Module 2 - Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure

Five Rs - five options for cloud rationalization

Rehost Refactor Rearchitect Rebuild/New Replace

Aspects of managing and operating a cloud platform:

- Define governance solutions for your cloud environment - Manage your cloud environment based on the governance solutions

How to get your organization ready for its Cloud adoption journey?

- Define skills and support readiness - Create your landing zone

Some common migration and innovation triggers include:

- Preparation for new technical capabilities - Gaining scale to meet market or geographic demands - Cost savings - Reduction in vendor or technical complexity - Optimization of internal operations - Increased business agility - Improvements to customer experiences or engagements - Transformation of products or services - Disruption of the market from new products or services

In the planning stage, you focus on two main actions:

- Rationalize your digital estate - Create your cloud adoption plan

Key steps to build this plan are to:

- Review sample business outcomes. - Identify the leading metrics that best represent progress toward the identified business outcomes. - Establish a financial model that aligns with the outcomes and learning metrics.

The cloud strategy team is responsible for:

- Reviewing business outcomes and creating the business justification plan for possible use cases for cloud adoption. - Building or facilitating the cloud rationalization process, selecting the first application, and managing subsequent prioritized backlogs. - Managing communications with key stakeholders and promoting the cloud adoption journey success and learnings.

Roles and responsibilities

A clear definition of the team structure, separation of responsibilities, and access requirements. They're defined in the Ready phase.

Rationalize your digital estate

A digital estate is the collection of IT assets that power business processes and supporting operations. To begin cloud rationalization of the digital estate, inventory all the digital assets the organization owns today. Then, evaluate each asset to determine the best way to migrate or modernize each component to the cloud. During this process, we recommend that you proceed incrementally, application by application. Don't make decisions too broadly or too early across the entire application portfolio.

Governance requirements will evolve throughout the cloud adoption journey

A flexible approach to governance is required. IT governance must move quickly and keep pace with business demands to stay relevant during cloud adoption. Incremental governance relies on a small set of corporate policies, processes, and tools to establish a foundation for adoption and governance. That foundation is called a minimum viable product (MVP).

Digital estate estimate

A rough estimate of the number and condition of workloads to be migrated. It's defined in the Plan phase.

Scale

Ability to scale elastically, delivering the right amount of IT resources.

Rehost

Also known as a lift-and-shift migration, a rehost effort moves a current state asset to the chosen cloud provider, with minimal change to overall architecture. Expected business outcome - Reduce capital expense. - Free up datacenter space. - Achieve rapid return on investment in the cloud.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

An MVP allows the governance team to quickly incorporate governance into implementations throughout the adoption lifecycle. After this MVP is deployed, additional layers of governance can be quickly incorporated into the environment.

Modern DevOps and software development lifecycle (SDLC)

Approaches that use cloud technology shorten the time from idea to product transformation. Combined, these tools invite the customer into the process to create shorter feedback loops and better customer experiences.

Create your cloud adoption plan (complementary)

As you develop a business justification model for your organization's cloud journey, identify business outcomes that can be mapped to specific cloud capabilities and business strategies to reach the desired state of transformation. Documenting all these outcomes and business strategies serves as the foundation for your organization's cloud adoption plan.

Reliability

Eases the burden of data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity.

Implementing the first application

It is key to learning and testing with confidence, as your cloud adoption journey starts. Use a two-pronged approach to select it: - Business criteria - Technical criteria

Cloud governance

Cloud governance creates guardrails that keep the organization on a safe path throughout the journey. The Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure governance model identifies key areas of importance. Each area relates to different types of risks the organization must address as it adopts more cloud services.

Cloud innovation

Cloud-native applications and data accelerate development and experimentation cycles. Older applications can take advantage of many of the same cloud-native benefits by modernizing the solution or components of the solution.

Cloud migration

It is the process of moving existing digital assets to a cloud platform. Existing assets are replicated to the cloud with minimal modifications. After an application or workload becomes operational in the cloud, users are transitioned from the existing solution to the cloud solution.

Define skills and support readiness

Create and implement a skills-readiness plan to: - Address current gaps. - Ensure that IT and business people are ready for the change and the new technologies. - Define support needs.

Cloud operations

Creates a maturity model that helps the team fulfill commitments to the business. In the early stages of maturity, customers focus on basic needs such as inventory and visibility into cloud assets and performance. As operations in the cloud mature, the team can use cloud native or hybrid approaches to maintaining operational compliance, which reduces the likelihood of interruptions through configuration and state management.

Create your cloud adoption plan

Develop a plan where prioritized workloads are defined and aligned with business outcomes.

Define business justification

Developing a clear business justification for cloud adoption with tangible, relevant costs and returns can be a complex process. First, review some common cloud computing business value areas to help justify the cloud adoption journey: - Cost - Scale - Productivity - Reliability

Establish clear business outcomes

Drive transparency and engagement for your journey across the organization.

Cost

Eliminates capital expense.

Migration preparation

Establish a rough migration backlog, based largely on the current state and desired outcomes.

Azure pricing calculator

Estimate your expected monthly bill by using the pricing calculator.

Azure Quickstart Center

For an interactive experience, view the environment-readiness content in the Azure portal. Go to the Azure Quickstart Center in the Azure portal, and select introduction to Azure setup. Then follow the step-by-step instructions.

Plan

How the cloud can advance your business strategy depends on your situation. The cloud delivers fundamental technology benefits that can aid in executing multiple business strategies. Using cloud-based approaches can improve business agility, reduce costs, accelerate time to market, and even allow businesses to quickly expand into new markets. Your organization already has technology investments, so you must understand your current state and then develop a prioritization plan for your cloud journey.

Business criteria

Identify an application currently in operation where the owner has a strong motivation to move to the cloud.

Define business justification

Identify business value opportunities to then select the right technology.

Azure readiness guide

Introduces features that help you organize resources, control costs, and secure and manage your organization.

Define strategy

Organizations adopt the cloud to help drive business transformation, such as processes and product improvement, market growth, and increased profitability. Across organizations of all types, sizes, and industries, the decision to invest in cloud technologies is often tightly connected to a critical business event. The reason for this connection is because the cloud might enable the appropriate solution for the event.

Motivations

Organizations find different triggers to adopt new technologies like Azure. Some triggers drive the organization to migrate current applications. Other triggers require creation of new capabilities, products, and experiences.

After compliance is achieved

Protection and recovery services provide low-impact ways to reduce the duration and effect of business process interruptions. During platform operations, aspects of various platforms (like containers or data platforms) are adjusted and automated to improve performance.

Refactor

Refactor also refers to the application development process of refactoring code to allow an application to deliver on new business opportunities. Expected business outcome - Experience faster and shorter updates. - Benefit from code portability. - Achieve greater cloud efficiency in the areas of resources, speed, cost.

Some tools to support you in your financial planning:

Remember that the chief financial officer (CFO) can be a key player in creating and landing zone a cloud adoption plan and can drive the value of migration and innovation and create a financial plan for adoption. Tools to support you in your financial planning: - Azure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator - Azure pricing calculator - Microsoft Cost Management + Billing

Productivity

Removes the need for many IT management chores.

Technical criteria

Select an application that has minimum dependencies and can be moved as a small group of assets.

Create your landing zone

Set up a migration target in the cloud to handle prioritized applications. The term landing zone is used to describe an environment that's provisioned and prepared to host workloads in a cloud environment, such as Azure. A fully functioning landing zone is the final deliverable of any iteration of the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure methodology.

Define governance solutions for your cloud environment

Solutions that meet your organization's business needs, provide agility, and control risks.

Replace

Sometimes the best approach is to replace the current application with a hosted application that meets all functionality required in the cloud. Expected business outcome - Standardize around industry best practices. - Accelerate adoption of business process-driven approaches. - Reallocate development investments into applications that create competitive differentiation or advantages.

What is the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure?

The Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure is a collection of documentation, technical guidance, best practices, and tools that aid in aligning business, organizational readiness, and technology strategies. This alignment enables a clear and actionable journey to the cloud that rapidly delivers on the desired business outcomes.

How is it structured?

The Cloud Adoption Framework helps customers undertake a simplified cloud journey in three main stages: - Plan - Ready - Adopt These three main stages are preceded by a business strategy phase and surrounded by an operations phase that expands through the cloud adoption journey.

Change management requirements

The cadence, processes, and documentation required to review and approve changes. They're defined in the Ready phase.

Cloud strategy team

The cloud strategy team consists of business leaders from finance, IT infrastructure, and application groups. The team leads the cloud analysis and planning phase.

Cloud management

The goal of the Manage methodology is to maximize ongoing business returns by creating balance between stability and operational costs. Stable business operations lead to stable revenue streams. Controlled operational costs reduce the overhead to drive more profit from the business processes.

Business outcomes

The key business objectives that drive this migration. They're defined in the Plan phase.

Establish clear business outcomes

The most successful cloud adoption journeys start with a business outcome in mind, backed up by financial reasoning and support. A business outcome is a concise, defined, and observable result or change in business performance that's captured by a specific measure.

Govern and manage

The process of adopting the cloud is a journey, not a destination. Along the way, there are clear milestones and tangible business benefits. The final state of cloud adoption is unknown when an organization begins the journey. As your organization moves or deploys new applications to the cloud, this final state starts to form.

Strategy and tools you use to migrate an application to Azure

These largely depend on your business motivations, technology strategies, and timelines. Your decisions are also based on a deep understanding of the application and the assets to be migrated. These assets include infrastructure, apps, and data. This decision tree serves as high-level guidance to help you select the best tools to use based on migration decisions.

Manage your cloud environment based on the governance solutions

To allow it to evolve, grow, and adapt to your organization's changing business needs.

Rationalize your digital estate

Understand the organization's current digital estate to maximize return and minimize risks by running a workload assessment.

Rebuild/New

Unsupported, misaligned, or out-of-date on-premises applications might be too expensive to carry forward. A new code base with a cloud-native design might be the most appropriate and efficient path. Expected business outcome - Accelerate innovation. - Build applications faster. - Reduce operational cost.

Microsoft Cost Management + Billing

Use and manage Azure and other cloud resources through a multiple-cloud cost management solution.

Azure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator

Use the TCO calculator to estimate the cost savings you can realize by migrating your application workloads to Azure.

Ready

We just looked at how a business plan aligned to a digital estate rationalization can ensure you know why you'll benefit from moving to the cloud. Cloud adoption is a strategic change that requires involvement from both business decision makers and end users.

Rearchitect

When aging applications aren't compatible with the cloud, they might need to be rearchitected to produce cost and operational efficiencies in the cloud. Expected business outcome - Gain application scale and agility. - Adopt new cloud capabilities more easily. - Use a mix of technology stacks.

Strategy

When you define your cloud business strategy, you should consider business impact, turnaround time, global reach, performance, and more. Here are key areas you need to focus on: - Establish clear business outcomes - Define business justification

Adopt

You've established your business justification and defined your business outcomes. You've prepared your organization. Your people and your Azure environment are ready to deploy your prioritized applications. You're ready to adopt cloud technologies following the selected digital estate rationalization path. As discussed, your organization has unique motivations to adopt the cloud. They all converge into migration or innovation to the cloud.