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Leveraging the Cloud Adoption Framework and Well-Architected Framework
The truth is anyone can move to the cloud. But building a well-structured Azure environment that’s optimised for your business can be tricky. That’s why Microsoft has created two best practice frameworks to support your organisation in leveraging the cloud. These Frameworks are known as the Cloud Adoption Framework and Azure Well-Architected Framework.
If you’re looking to follow best practices for adopting and optimising Azure, then look no further. In this blog, we’ll be diving into what the Cloud Adoption Framework and Azure Well-Architected Framework are, how they work together, and how you can start leveraging them.
Azure Cloud Adoption Framework
The Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) is a collection of proven documentation, implementation guidance, best practices, and tools from Microsoft designed to help businesses move to Azure with confidence. This framework should be used by businesses that are looking to migrate to Azure and want to create a highly optimised environment from the get-go.
There are six stages to the CAF, and each stage has been crafted to help you accelerate your cloud adoption journey. The six stages of the Cloud Adoption Framework are:
Strategy: Start by understanding your business objectives to identify how Azure can support them
1. Plan: Align your people, processes and technology to map your cloud migration plan
2. Ready: Prepare your environment and start deploying your first landing zone
3. Adopt: During this stage you can either migrate your on-prem environment to the cloud, or innovate your digital estate leveraging cloud-native technologies
4. Govern: Create benchmarks and implement a governance minimum variable product to help you stay on track
5. Manage: Monitor your environment through data collection and alerts to ensure you’re following best practices
Think of the CAF framework as your guide to navigating your cloud migration.
Learn more in our Beginners Guide to the Cloud Adoption Framework.
Azure Well-Architected Framework
The Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework provides technical guidance specifically at the workload level across five different pillars; cost optimisation, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and operational excellence. Aligning to the Azure Well-Architected Framework will allow you to build highly optimised Azure infrastructure.
This framework should be used by businesses that are looking to optimise their cloud investment and ensure they’re aligning to best practices.
Think of the WAF framework as your guide to maximising your Azure investment.
Learn more in our blog post, The Five Pillars of the Azure-Well Architected Framework.
So how do the Cloud Adoption Framework and the Azure Well-Architected Framework work together?
These two frameworks can be used at various points of your cloud journey to help maximise your Azure investment. In short, the Azure Well-Architected Framework helps you optimise a specific Azure workload, and the Cloud Adoption Framework is your reference point for migrating to the cloud according to best practices.
If you’re new to the cloud, then you should begin by leveraging the Cloud Adoption Framework. The six stages Microsoft have identified are crucial to ensuring you have a successful migration. It’s important that you really focus on building an effective plan and strategy before migrating.
Once you’ve migrated, or built an application for the cloud, it’s time to start looking at the Azure Well-Architected Framework. Microsoft carefully crafted these five pillars to guide you in building optimised workloads in Azure.
If you’re already in Azure and want to find out how well aligned you are to the Azure Well-Architected Framework, then you’re in luck. Our experts are offering personalised 10-minute videos that will look at your Azure environment and provide you with recommendations you could take to better align to Microsoft’s best practices. If you’d like to claim your very own video, simply sign up via this webpage.