What is Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure?

The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure is guidance that's designed to help you create and implement business and technology strategies for the cloud. It provides best practices, documentation, and tools. Cloud architects, IT professionals, and business decision-makers use this information to achieve their cloud adoption goals.

By using the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure best practices, organizations can better align their business and technical strategies to ensure success. Watch the following video to learn more.

Microsoft Azure Cloud Adoption Framework

The Microsoft Azure cloud adoption framework breaks up its cloud migration process into eight steps.

Step 1: Strategy

Work with stakeholders to determine the business and financial motives for migrating to the cloud, as well as your expected outcomes.

Step 2: Plan

Based on your strategy, develop a plan to achieve your expected outcomes. You’ll need to inventory and analyze your assets to determine which should be moved to the cloud, as well as select your technical and governance teams.

Step 3: Ready

Next, you will prepare for your cloud migration. You’ll need to adapt your processes, people, and IT environment to ensure they’re ready for cloud adoption.

Step 4: Migrate

Now, you’ll migrate workloads to the cloud in an iterative manner, using Azure tools and best practices.

Step 5: Innovate

As you move through your migration, you’ll likely find that some workloads need to be adapted to function properly, or may need to remain partially or fully on-premises.

Step 6: Adopt

Workloads are now functioning in the cloud and you’ll start to see some of the outcomes-adoption-framework/reference/tools from the strategy phase come to life.

Step 7: Govern

You’ll need to develop a governance plan based on your goals, industry standards, and any laws or regulations your cloud systems are subject to.

Step 8: Manage

During the last phase of Azure cloud adoption, you’ll manage, monitor, and optimize your cloud systems.

CAF Lifecycle

Benefits of CAF

With a cloud adoption framework, your migration process will be supported by your public cloud provider’s best practices, and all of the key steps and processes are clearly defined in detailed documentation. Cloud adoption framework is a great way to align the technical changes involved in a cloud migration with the business goals for the project. A cloud adoption framework provides a robust and flexible model for you to develop migration strategies and mechanisms that support your business goals.