Abstract

Adopting Amazon Web Services (AWS) presents many benefits, such as increased business agility and flexibility, as well as reduced costs.

However, in order to fully realize these benefits your staff may need to acquire new skills and create or update core processes.

Doing so can maximize the business value and minimize the business risks of cloud adoption.

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) helps organizations understand how cloud adoption transforms the way they work, and it provides structure to identify and address gaps in skills and processes.

Applying the AWS CAF in your organization results in an actionable plan with defined work streams that can guide your organization’s path to cloud adoption.

This framework leverages our experiences and best practices in assisting organizations around the world with their cloud adoption journey.

Introduction

Cloud computing introduces a significant shift in how technology is obtained, used, and managed.

It also shifts how organizations budget and pay for technology services.

Cloud computing benefits organizations by giving them the ability to trade capital expense for variable expense, gain advantage from massive economies of scale, make agile capacity decisions, increase business speed and agility, stop spending money running and maintaining data centers, and go global in minutes.

With Amazon Web Services (AWS) your organization can immediately provision the compute, storage, network, and database resources needed for any project.

These resources launch and are ready for use by your project team within minutes.

The environment can be reconfigured easily, updated quickly, scaled up or down automatically to meet usage patterns and optimize spending, or shut down temporarily or permanently.

The billing for AWS services becomes an operational expense rather than a capital expense.

Cloud adoption requires that fundamental changes are discussed and considered across the entire organization, and that stakeholders across all organizational units—both outside and within IT—support these changes.

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) provides guidance that supports each unit in your organization so that each area understands how to update skills, adapt existing processes, and introduce new processes to take maximum advantage of the services provided by cloud computing.

Thousands of organizations around the world have successfully migrated their businesses to the cloud, relying on the AWS CAF to guide their efforts.

AWS and our partners provide tools and services that can help you every step of the way to ensure complete understanding and transition.

At the highest level, the AWS CAF organizes guidance into six focus areas.

We describe these focus areas as Perspectives.

Figure 1 shows the six Perspectives of the AWS CAF.