As part of the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), Microsoft provides a set of guidelines, best practices, and resources(tools) to assist organizations in adopting Azure cloud services in a cost-effective manner.
In this post, I will try to give you an idea of how you could take advantage of these.
First and foremost, you should thoroughly understand the CAF lifecycle, as shown in the image below:
The above three stages, namely governance, management and security, are continuous components of cloud adoption (CAF).
Define Strategy
The first step in the CAF life cycle is to define a strategy. Simply put, this step provides an organization with a roadmap for designing, implementing, and optimizing the cloud adoption experience.
Defining an organization’s strategy is perhaps one of the most important steps if not the most important, during the CAF lifecycle process, as this is where the foundation for the transition from on-premise to the cloud is laid. In this step, decisions are discussed and made regarding technical, financial, and labor resources and timelines that must be strictly adhered to.
Tools & Templates :
MS Learn Link : Develop a cloud adoption strategy
Plan
The Planning step is equally important as the main goals set. In this step, individual teams will be organized to cooperate and follow the cloud adoption plan. In this step, define the CAF key components such as risk assessment, cost estimation, stakeholder identification, assessment of current equipment etc.
Tools & Templates :
- Strategic Migration Assessment and Readiness Tool
- Cloud journey tracker
- Strategy and plan template
- Cloud adoption plan generator
- Using the Strategy-Plan-Ready-Govern Azure DevOps template
MS Learn Link : Develop a cloud adoption plan
Ready
The Ready step implies the completion of the assessment of the organisation, the preparation of the individual teams and the development of a plan. In this step the organization will create the landing zones and start working based on them. There are several areas they’ll have to work, i.e. Identity and access management, governance, security, data etc.
Tha matrix below provides the links for each Azure landing zone design area :
| Resource | Resource organization |
| Governace | Design area: Azure governance |
| Identity and Access Management | Azure identity and access management design area |
| Security | Design area: Security |
| Management | Design area: Management for Azure environments |
| Networking | Network topology and connectivity |
| Billing and AD tenant | Azure billing offers and Active Directory tenants |
| Automation and DevOps | Platform automation and DevOps |
Tools & Templates :
- Readiness checklist
- Azure naming tool
- Naming and tagging conventions tracking template
- CAF Foundation blueprint
- CAF Migration landing zone blueprint
- Terraform modules
- Terraform registry
- Enterprise-scale landing zone
- Data management zone
- Data landing zone
- Data management and landing zone Azure DevOps template
MS Learn Link : Prepare for cloud adoption
Adopt
The Adopt stage refers to the stage in which an organisation has started adopting cloud services, and this can be achieved by following the adopted methodology that contains four phases: migration, modernisation, innovation and relocation.
- Migrate : Resources are moved to the cloud as part of the migration process.
- Modernize : Modernization aims to improve the performance of existing business workloads.
- Innovate : An organization can rapidly transform business outcomes using cloud technology to deliver innovative, customer-centric solutions.
- Relocate : The relocation phase includes moving a workload to an alternative Azure region.
Tools & Templates :
- Migrate
- Innovate
MS Learn Link : Cloud adoption
Govern
The Govern stage is about the policies adopted by an organisation operating cloud services. Governance aims to improve data security, manage risks and maintain the well-functioning of cloud systems.
Tools & Templates :
- Governance benchmark assessment
- CAF Foundation blueprint
- Governance discipline template
- Deployment Acceleration discipline template
- Identity Baseline discipline template
- Resource Consistency discipline template
- Security Baseline discipline template
- Azure Security Benchmark
- Azure Governance Visualizer
- Azure Governance Visualizer accelerator
- Microsoft Product Placemat for CMMC L3
- PSRule for Azure
MS Learn Link : Governance in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure
Manage
As the name indicates, this Manage stage deals with a key-component i.e. management of an organization’s cloud solutions. Without a plan for robust, well-managed operations of cloud solutions, these efforts will deliver limited payoffs.
Tools & Templates :
MS Learn Link : Cloud management in the Cloud Adoption Framework
Secure
The Secure stage, like Govern and Manage, is a continuous process that will not stop, as it should always be improving and adopting the latest security methods to continuously provide zero-trust authority and secure cloud solutions.
Tools & Templates :
MS Learn Link : Security in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure