What is the Cloud Adoption Framework?
A Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) is a pragmatic process that helps you align your business objectives and prevent pitfalls in your cloud transformation journey.
A recent study from the Cloud Industry Forum shows that at least 88% of UK organisations have accelerated plans to adopt cloud computing, while 67% expect to increase migration to cloud services.
Also, 87% of organisations in the public sector agreed that they would migrate all their IT infrastructure to the cloud only if they had the perfect framework to guide their cloud transformation process.
This post explores the importance and benefits of a cloud adoption framework in your cloud transformation journey.
Importance of a Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF)
A CAF comprises documented procedures, best practices, implementation guidelines, and tools that can help accelerate a cloud adoption process. Contrary to popular opinion, CAF is not just for companies adopting the cloud for the first time. It also is an essential requirement for every business on any cloud transformation journey.
For example, with 78% of organisations citing fear that failure may be a barrier to leveraging adopted cloud services, CAF can help them navigate the challenges and intricacies of making the best use of cloud services. Besides, 60% of business leaders believe that their organisations are doing just enough to digitise their operations through cloud adoption, leaving room for further adoption. A CAF can help such businesses identify the right services to add to existing ones and how to implement, manage, and align them with business operations effectively.
In addition, many UK-based companies are accelerating the adoption of multi-cloud environments to access new services and applications. Still, security concerns, lack of implementation and management skills, and Multiprotocol Label Switching costs threaten to stifle wider adoption.
“As organisations continue to radically transform their infrastructures and rely more on the public cloud, they are uncovering new connectivity and security challenges,” says Klaus Gheri, VP, Network Security, Barracuda. A CAF can help such organisations expand the adoption of new cloud services and help new consumers overcome the security, connectivity, and implementation challenges.
The Benefits of a Cloud Adoption Framework
The primary benefits of a CAF include defining the cloud adoption strategy to establish the core business goals and examining the technological and cost considerations to provide a clear picture of what you will achieve by adopting cloud services. In addition, a clear idea of why you need to migrate to the cloud allows you to choose the most suitable cloud capabilities and cloud migration strategies for your company.
Additionally, a CAF is beneficial since it helps establish the motivations behind the need to adopt cloud technologies. A cloud service provider like Cloud Geeni meets with your organisation’s stakeholders, including executives and business leaders, to establish the relevant reasons for promoting a cloud adoption strategy. Identifying the reasons enables the documentation of expected business functions after migrating to the cloud.
Since cloud adoption can be a tedious and expensive process, a CAF allows you to understand the financial and technical considerations during a cloud migration process. Such considerations include the cost analysis of moving to the cloud and the maintenance and management of adopted cloud solutions. In addition, a CAF can help identify the technological efficiency, flexibility, and capabilities absent in the on-premise setup to make a business case for migrating to the cloud.
With a customised cloud adoption framework for your organisation, you can prioritise the cloud transformation opportunities that align with your strategic business objectives. Aligning cloud transformation initiatives with measurable business results and primary stakeholders can help determine the value of adopting cloud technologies to enhance cloud readiness, facilitate company-wide change management procedures, and develop strategies for continuous improvement.
Lastly, CAF provides a security perspective crucial to ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of cloud workloads, applications, and data. It brings together the essential stakeholders, such as security architects, cloud compliance officers, internal audit leaders, and CISOs, to ensure your adopted cloud environment is secure and compliant with existing regulations.
A Customised Cloud Geeni CAF for Your Company
Several frameworks are available from the top cloud providers but often provide standard guidelines that are not unique to your business needs. An effective CAF should address the cloud adoption needs in a specific environment to ensure quick, cost-effective, and professional deployment and management of cloud environments suited to meet your specific business objectives and requirements. Cloud Geeni can develop a customised CAF through a five-stage process.
1.Understand Your Business Strategy
Understanding your business strategy is the first step toward developing a unique CAF for your organisation. Cloud Geeni experts establish an understanding of all your business processes, objectives, and operations to determine the cloud services needed to support them. Also, they develop a cloud adoption tracker to assist in identifying an appropriate cloud adoption path suitable for your organisation.
2. Planning the Adoption Approach
Cloud Geeni works with your organisation to map a cloud adoption plan in the planning phase. The cloud adoption plan provides your business’s iterative steps to transition from its current IT deployments to modern and agile cloud services. Planning is also essential to align your people, processes, and technology to map the various requirements to rationalise the need for implementing identified cloud services cloud-effectively.
3. Readying the Deployment Environment
After understanding your business strategies and planning a cloud adoption framework, a Cloud Geeni CAF provides the steps for readying your environment for the deployment of cloud services. In particular, Cloud Geeni performs readiness and pre-deployment assessments to determine bandwidth demands for each department in the organisation to prioritise bandwidth demands for your cloud applications.
4. Cloud Adoption
A Cloud Geeni’s CAF boils down to adopting and implementing the cloud technologies. In this step, experts work with your organisation to migrate your on-premise workloads to the cloud. Expert guidance during the adoption phase is critical to preventing data leakages, security incidents, and other pitfalls that may inhibit your cloud modernisation efforts. If your company has already adopted cloud services, this phase supports innovation to help you leverage the benefits of cloud-native solutions to modernise your current digital environment.
5. Cloud Governance and Management
Cloud Geeni helps you create benchmarks for tracking your cloud adoption progress and implement a governance framework to ensure you stay on track in your cloud transformation efforts. Furthermore, Cloud Geeni’s managed services can collect data and alerts to help monitor your cloud environment and manage it by leveraging performance tracking and best practices. Governance and management ensure you achieve a resilient cloud platform that can withstand challenges and support your business operations.
Adopting the Cloud for your Business
Although the Cloud Adoption Framework was originally created by Microsoft for adopting public cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure, any MSP offering private managed cloud services should also provide potential clients with this structure.
Cloud Geeni focus on the end user experience and ensuring that our solution fully aligns with your business needs, aims and operational objectives.
To compliment our CFA we also offer potential clients an no obligation audit of their current IT infrastructure, in which we are happy to offer advise around additional aspects of IT landscapes such as cybersecurity and data management.
Schedule a call with a Cloud Expert today to learn more.