AWS Cloud Adoption PDF
AWS Cloud Adoption PDF
AWS Cloud Adoption PDF
Maturity Perspective
August 2016
Amazon Web Services AWS CAF Maturity Perspective August 2016
2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Notices
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which are subject to change without notice. Customers are responsible for
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Contents
Abstract 4
Introduction 4
Maturity Perspective Components 5
Transformation Capability 8
Transformation and Migrations 8
Target Platform Capabilities 10
Considerations 13
Application Portfolio Analysis 14
Considerations 17
Cloud Maturity Heat Map 18
Considerations 20
Roadmap Sequencing 21
Considerations 23
Cloud Readiness Assessment 24
Considerations 25
IT Management Assessment 26
Considerations 27
AWS Cloud Maturity Tools 28
Well-Architected Program and Trusted Advisor 28
Conclusion 31
CAF Taxonomy and Terms 32
Notes 32
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Abstract
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) 1 provides
best practices and prescriptive guidance to accelerate an organization's move to
cloud computing. The CAF guidance is broken into a number of areas of focus
that are relevant to implementing cloud-based IT systems. These focus areas are
called perspectives. Each perspective is covered in a separate whitepaper. This
whitepaper covers the Maturity Perspective, which focuses on assessing an
organizations current state, identifying a future state, and creating roadmaps to
achieve the future state of cloud adoption.
Introduction
The Maturity Perspective contains six
components as depicted in Figure 1.
The focus of this perspective is on the
progressive implementation of cloud-
based IT capabilities in line with
organizational maturity and goals.
The perspective and the six
components typically align with work
breakdown structures including
milestones, inputs, outputs,
deliverables, and decision points.
Organizations that are moving to the
cloud typically establish a Cloud
Center of Excellence (CCoE) to
provide governance and to own the Figure 1: Components of the Maturity
migration and transformation Perspective
program. The CCoE also allows
dedicated personnel to undertake opportunistic and tactical projects that
maximize the value an organization can derive from the cloud without disrupting
the main program of work.
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You can use the Maturity Perspective to perform an initial baseline of the current
state of your infrastructure, applications, and workloads. You then combine your
business strategy and other internal change drivers with external drivers
including market influences, regulatory constraints, and shareholder demands to
define the future state that is right for your organization. You can use the
components of the Maturity Perspective to define your desired target state and
publish a viable roadmap. You can take advantage of automated asset and
network discovery to minimize time to market for all transformations to the
cloud whether all-in or hybrid. IT transformation becomes a key enabler that
AWS and the AWS CAF use to support fast-paced migrations and
transformations.
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Table 1 lists the tools and activities included in the Maturity Perspective.
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Transformation Capability
The AWS CAF Maturity Perspective provides you with the planning,
management, and decision tools you need for your cloud migration journey.
These tools will be helpful when you are making decisions whether to build
hybrid solutions, blend legacy and new solutions, or commit to a cloud-only
solution.
The AWS CAF is flexible and scalable for use with all migration and
transformation types. Small migrations can be managed with ad hoc project
management methodologies and common office productivity tools. Larger and
more complex transformations typically require that your organization establish
a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) to provide program management, decision
support, and to procure and maintain the necessary third-party discovery and
migration tools needed to move hundreds or thousands of workloads to the
cloud. In all cases, your goal is to drastically reduce both the time to market and
time to value while maintaining business and technology alignment.
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Hybrid cloud environments are more complex and more challenging to optimize
than an all-in cloud transformation, due to duplication and more complex
network infrastructure. The AWS CAF has successfully been used in enterprise-
wide hybrid cloud environments and to build disaster recovery, bursting, and
replications solutions.
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These additional risks span all four pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Program:
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Keep dynamic data closer to the compute and static data closer to the end user.
Implement elasticity.
Focus the portfolio management of the transforming environment and the future
state IT environment on the transition to operations and not just on the software
development life cycle (SDLC). Consider incorporating the AWS cloud design
principles into the overall governance and management approach used by your
organization. As part of that, setting governance to create and maintain a service
catalog that development teams leverage first will drive efficiency, flexibility, and
speed of delivery. The service catalog requires a description of the target platform
in three key areas:
Technical design and implementation
Security monitoring and performance management
Operations and support
As your environment evolves toward the cloud, identify key performance
indicators (KPIs) to ensure that the environment is continuously tuned and
improved to provide the greatest business value. You can track technical
performance measures, KPIs, service-level agreements (SLAs), and operational-
level agreements (OLAs) from day one by automating the collection and display
of key parameters to enable the glide path or burn down you want to use as a
project management tool.
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Considerations
Do incorporate service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud-specific
principles into management and governance principles.
Do focus first initiatives on providing the shortest time to value.
Do link the target platform capabilities to business objectives.
Do complete a well-architected assessment regularly to maintain business
alignment and delivery of expected levels of systemic quality.
Do think about the whole environment, including the production,
development, and test environments needed to support solutions.
Do use bimodal IT to unleash an environment where experimentation and
validated learning dominates. Many good ideas flow from the bottom up and
from end users and customers.
Do not just recreate your existing environment in the cloud. Consider taking
the first steps toward decomposing the environment to provide greater
flexibility as you move to the cloud.
Do not attempt to perform an exhaustive application portfolio analysis.
Consider assessing a smaller list of the top applications that you expect will
provide the greatest return.
Do not have hosting discussions prior to sourcing discussions. Consider
making the hosting decisions dependent on and aligned with the sourcing
decision.
Do not allow traditional review and approval processes to be blockers or to
slow down the pace of transformation.
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The goal of application portfolio analysis is to collect and analyze all or a portion
of the portfolio of applications to determine which applications should move to
the cloud, the order in which they should move, and the goal of each application
migration. In most enterprise transformations, the complexity of the existing
environment typically mandates specialist discovery and migration approaches.
Figure 5 illustrates this complexity.
AWS and its partners have a range of specialist methods and tools to conduct
auto discovery and to process migration waves. There are many ways to select the
workloads you want to migrate. For example, the focus could be on a specific line
of business, strategic outsourcing, tactical pivots, a few mission critical
applications that are high cost and high value, or a few low risk applications.
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Organize applications into logical groupings for the assessment. These logical
groupings will typically align with the application migration pattern of
replatform, retire, retain, repurchase, rehost, or refactor, as spelled out in Table
3. These groupings are sometimes referred to as the Six Rs.
Retaining This is the do nothing option. Legacy costs remain and Low
obsolescence costs typically increase over time.
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Considerations
Do assess your applications based on the Six Rs. Think in terms of
migration waves, and dont wait for a big bang migration. Start small, start
now, and gain momentum.
Do use the consistency of the application portfolio analysis to help with
portfolio governance. Minimize the scope of compliance environments when
refactoring, replatforming, or repurchasing.
Do leverage automated discovery tools to conduct portfolio inventory where
possible.
Do not attempt a complete analysis of your entire portfolio. Consider
selecting a subset of the portfolio to quickly start your initiative while you are
gathering additional insight on the current state.
Do not start an assessment prior to articulating the assessment criteria.
Consider determining which criteria will be used for evaluation and gain
agreement they will provide the right data needed to migrate applications.
Do not just rely on existing asset configuration management databases
(CMDBs). Auto discovery always discovers more workloads and dependencies
than previously thought.
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the enduring capabilities. In addition, consider ways that you can minimize
bureaucracy. Figure 8 lays out cloud adoption skills in six key areas. As you
migrate to the cloud, begin to think in terms of how cloud technologies are
optimally architected and operated to deliver value to the business.
For a Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) assessment, you evaluate value,
process, and people to determine how current GRC practices are positioned for
cloud adoption. Here are a few example questions: Do you have a single, holistic
governance framework? Have you described cloud-based usage? Is technology
risk-managed across the enterprise? Is compliance based on key business success
factors?
For technology and architecture, you evaluate how information and applications
are being managed, and you evaluate their readiness for cloud adoption. For
example, are application architecture decisions and constraints created with
business, application development, and operations teams? Are your data and
information architecture integrated with your infrastructure and solution
architecture? Is there a unified architecture discipline that spans across business
units, development, and operations?
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Your organization can use the results of these assessments to create and sequence
roadmaps, and inform your cloud readiness and IT management assessments.
Considerations
Do limit the time spent performing assessments. The time this should take
days and not weeks.
Do leverage target platform capabilities to establish the scope of the
assessment.
Do make analysis and planning a collective effort with a small group of
people, the CCoE, that represents the whole organization.
Do encourage experiments and validated learning early in the transformation
lifecycle.
Do not try to use the AWS maturity assessment to attempt to measure your
organization against other companies or an industry standard.
Do not over formalize your Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) and project
plans. Allow time for experimentation and validated learning to identify
opportunities to reduce time to market.
Do not underestimate the big picture clarity that the AWS Well-Architected
Program provides.
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Roadmap Sequencing
The Roadmap Sequencing component of the AWS CAF Maturity perspective can
be used to define the ordering of all the required initiatives, and any
dependencies among them, that are necessary to achieve the goals of cloud
adoption. You can use this information to create the roadmap for execution.
Figure 9 depicts the application migration lifecycle using the six Rs. All
transformations occur using one or more of the six Rs. They provide for logical
groupings of migration waves that are aligned with the business to minimize
disruption and time to value.
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Table 5 lists typical roadmap sequences and gives you key activities for each
phase in your portfolio.
Phase Activity
Service Analysis and Identify as-is assets and their configuration. Bare metal and VMs.
Design
Service Transition Monitor a migration either hybrid or all-in on the cloud for the
entire migration duration. Strike baselines and run diffs to monitor
progress of the evolving architecture. Dev to QA to Prod etc.
Service Transition Explore before, during, and after migration to identify security
vulnerabilities, misconfiguration and under/over utilized assets.
quality of migrations and transformations you can increase the velocity of change
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to the AWS cloud. This also sets the expectation that initiatives and priorities will
change as more information is uncovered.
Considerations
Do focus on delivering business value rather than focusing on technical
change.
Do roll out your plan in waves to maintain flexibility and best use insight
uncovered during other programs and projects.
Do validate the roadmap with business sponsors regularly. This provides a
feedback loop from project execution to project planning to ensure that
business outcomes remain the top priority.
Do integrate (when possible) with current business initiatives rather than
making your cloud adoption initiatives separate.
Do leverage the AWS Well-Architected Program to gain clarity and verify
your solution design.
Do not attempt to represent all active programs and projects.
Do not over plan before experimenting with migration waves. Learn by
doing.
Do not underestimate the importance of using a Cloud Center of Excellence
(CCoE) to manage the risk and emergent opportunities of a migration or
transformation.
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You use the heat map to review your current maturity, and you use the cloud
readiness assessment to focus on addressing gaps that the analysis of your
current environment and your currently proposed programs and projects has
highlighted. This gives you the opportunity to develop a mitigation strategy to
address the areas at risk of failure during cloud adoption efforts. Pivoting and
opportunistic transformation then become possible as means to recover value.
Focus on the hot areas of the heat map to generate a mitigation strategy you can
use as recommendations for moving forward with a cloud adoption strategy. For
example, if the GRC analysis indicates a red status for compliance under
operations, you would develop a set of recommendations and a mitigation
strategy to shift the status from red to green.
The recommendations you create using the heat map and the cloud readiness
matrix are not existing parts of programs or projects. You can use these
recommendations to mitigate or remove risk and to evaluate programs and
projects in flight to identify and mitigate problems as early as possible.
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Considerations
Do use the output from the target platform, application portfolio analysis,
and heat map efforts as inputs to cloud readiness assessment.
Do revisit the readiness assessment regularly to update and change plans as
you gain new insight.
Do use the insights discovered during readiness assessment to help with
roadmap sequencing and prioritization.
Do be flexible. Use experimentation and validated learning to pivot and
refocus to minimize time to market and time to value.
Do not perform detailed and exhaustive assessments early in the migration.
Consider focusing on the most important areas that need addressing, and use
additional insight gleaned to determine next steps.
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IT Management Assessment
The IT Management Assessment component of the AWS CAF Maturity
perspective gives you guidance by capturing relevant information on existing IT
management structures, practices, and processes that might need to change for
cloud adoption.
As your organization prepares to start the journey to the cloud, senior leaders
need to engage with all stakeholders to manage blockers and other risk-
increasing processes, bureaucracy, and business components. Typically, an
organization forms a CCOE to manage the change and transformation, the
organization will experience during the transformation. The CCoE provides
communication to all stakeholders and manages expectations through regular
communication of value realized.
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Considerations
Do incorporate SOA and cloud-specific principles into management and
governance principles.
Do focus first initiatives on providing the shortest time to value.
Do link the target platform capabilities to business objectives.
Do use the Well-Architected Program to complete regular assessments to
highlight progress toward business goals and quality objectives.
Do think about the whole environment, which includes the production,
development, and test environments.
Do not attempt to perform an exhaustive application portfolio analysis.
Consider assessing a smaller list of the top applications that are expected to
provide the greatest return.
Do not just recreate your existing environment in the cloud. Consider taking
the first steps toward decomposing the environment to provide greater
flexibility and experience growth.
Do not have hosting discussions prior to sourcing discussions. Consider
making the hosting decisions dependent upon and aligned to the sourcing
decision.
Do not solely rely on rigid plans and milestones as measures of success. Keep
focused on time to market and time to value.
Do not wait for all stakeholders to fully define their needs and requirements.
Start experimenting early.
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Security Leverage best practices to protect data and assets in the AWS
cloud.
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During the review, your key business stakeholders and technical experts will
work directly with a certified AWS Solutions Architect or Professional Services
Consultant to validate that the workload follows AWS best practices and initiate
invaluable business and technical conversations across multiple organizations
within the organization. A typical high-level summary of a Well-Architected
Review is depicted in Figure 13.
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You can use the Well-Architected Program as a phase review tool at key
migration and transformation milestones. The review provides a status of the
whole system that complements readiness and major functional reviews. The
review supports both waterfall and agile projects and the program management
delivery methods used in each project type. Figure 14 illustrates a roadmap for an
AWS Well-Architected Review.
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Conclusion
The speed at which an organization can migrate to the cloud is not constrained by
the timelines necessary to procure and prepare on-premises datacenter
environments. For example, using AWS automation services, including AWS
CloudFormation templates, an entire data center can be created in just minutes.
Be aware that hybrid solutions are inherently complex and pose constraints on
workload optimization and in maximizing business value.
Any organization considering a move to the cloud needs to understand the need
for experimentation and validated learning to fully realize the benefits of cloud
computing. Outdated business culture and process are often blockers to
successful cloud migrations and transformations. When you take advantage of
agile and lean ways of working, such as automation and infrastructure as code,
you could drastically minimize time to market and time to value. Consider using a
bimodal approach to IT, which can help minimize disruption to the organization
while moving rapidly forward. Establish a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to
find the right balance between the fast and slow modes and lessen the friction on
your journey to the cloud. Use the AWS Well-Architected Program reviews to
learn both best practices and ways to avoid risk.
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When combined, the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and the Cloud Adoption
Methodology (CAM) can be used as guidance during your journey to the AWS
cloud.
Notes
1 https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws_cloud_adoption_framework.pdf
2 https://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Cloud_Best_Practices.pdf
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