AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF)
The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) leverages AWS experience and best practices to help you digitally transform and accelerate your business outcomes through innovative use of AWS. AWS CAF identifies specific organizational capabilities that underpin successful cloud transformations.
These capabilities provide best practice guidance that helps you improve your cloud readiness. AWS CAF groups its capabilities in six perspectives: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations. Each perspective comprises a set of capabilities that functionally related stakeholders own or manage in the cloud transformation journey.
AWS CAF perspectives and foundational capabilities
- Business perspective helps ensure that your cloud investments accelerate your digital transformation ambitions and business outcomes. Common stakeholders include chief executive officer (CEO), chief financial officer (CFO), chief operations officer (COO), chief information officer (CIO), and chief technology officer (CTO).
- People perspective serves as a bridge between technology and business, accelerating the cloud journey to help organizations more rapidly evolve to a culture of continuous growth, learning, and where change becomes business-as-normal, with focus on culture, organizational structure, leadership, and workforce. Common stakeholders include CIO, COO, CTO, cloud director, and cross-functional and enterprise-wide leaders.
- Governance perspective helps you orchestrate your cloud initiatives while maximizing organizational benefits and minimizing transformation-related risks. Common stakeholders include chief transformation officer, CIO, CTO, CFO, chief data officer (CDO), and chief risk officer (CRO).
- Platform perspective helps you build an enterprise-grade, scalable, hybrid cloud platform, modernize existing workloads, and implement new cloud-native solutions. Common stakeholders include CTO, technology leaders, architects, and engineers.
- Security perspective helps you achieve the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data and cloud workloads. Common stakeholders include chief information security officer (CISO), chief compliance officer (CCO), internal audit leaders, and security architects and engineers.
- Operations perspective helps ensure that your cloud services are delivered at a level that meets the needs of your business. Common stakeholders include infrastructure and operations leaders, site reliability engineers, and information technology service managers.
Cloud transformation journey
Use the AWS CAF to identify and prioritize transformation opportunities, evaluate and improve your cloud readiness, and iteratively evolve your transformation
The framework starts by identifying six groups of foundational perspectives (Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations), totaling 47 discrete capabilities.
From there it identifies four transformation domains (Technology, Process, Organization, and Product) that must participate in a successful digital transformation.
- Envision phase focuses on demonstrating how cloud will help accelerate your business outcomes. It does so by identifying and prioritizing transformation opportunities across each of the four transformation domains in line with your strategic business objectives. Associating your transformation initiatives with key stakeholders (senior individuals capable of influencing and driving change) and measurable business outcomes will help you demonstrate value as you progress through your transformation journey.
- Align phase focuses on identifying capability gaps across the six AWS CAF perspectives, identifying cross-organizational dependencies, and surfacing stakeholder concerns and challenges. Doing so will help you create strategies for improving your cloud readiness, ensure stakeholder alignment, and facilitate relevant organizational change management activities.
- Launch phase focuses on delivering pilot initiatives in production and on demonstrating incremental business value. Pilots should be highly impactful and if/when successful they will help influence future direction. Learning from pilots will help you adjust your approach before scaling to full production.
- Scale phase focuses on expanding production pilots and business value to desired scale and ensuring that the business benefits associated with your cloud investments are realized and sustained.
