Migration & Modernization
Evolving your Cloud capabilities to enable your important business objectives
In today’s rapidly evolving landscape, cloud has become a cornerstone for business seeking to drive innovation, boost efficiency, and attain strategic goals. As organizations strive to leverage cloud to enable business objectives, continuously evolving cloud capabilities becomes crucial. In this blog we will explain how Amazon Web Services (AWS) empowers your organization to develop a comprehensive cloud strategy that directly aligns with and enables your business goals. We will highlight examples of AWS tools and services designed to help you measure and evolve your cloud capabilities over time. By leveraging AWS’s expertise and prescriptive guidance you can transform your organizational ecosystem, from technology and processes to people and culture. And this transformation will enhance your organization’s ability to leverage cloud to adapt, innovate, and thrive in an increasingly competitive market.
Common challenges organizations face on their Cloud migrations
Organizations face numerous challenges when developing and implementing their cloud strategies. A primary hurdle is the lack of clear vision and alignment, where organizations struggle to connect cloud initiatives with overarching business objectives. Many organizations rush into cloud migration without a well-defined plan. This can often lead to confusion and inefficiencies. Another challenge is a prevalent skills gap. Many businesses face a shortage of in-house cloud expertise and difficulties in upskilling their workforce. Change management is also a critical issue, as organizations face cultural resistance to adopting new technologies and processes. They must overcome traditional mindsets, address fears about job security and changing roles while encouraging the adoption of new collaborative and agile practices.
On the technological aspects of cloud adoption, security and compliance concerns loom large. Organizations grapple with ensuring data protection and privacy in the cloud while meeting industry-specific regulatory requirements. Cost management presents another challenge, with some organizations encountering unexpected or escalating costs and struggling to accurately forecast their cloud spending. Performance and reliability are also top of mind, with businesses working to ensure consistent application performance and availability requirements. Finally, organizations must navigate governance and operational complexities that arise from scaling cloud usage. As cloud resources expand, maintaining control over these assets becomes increasingly challenging, often leading to inefficiencies and compliance risks.
Evolving your capabilities throughout your Cloud migration journey
As demonstrated in the challenges highlighted above, embracing cloud technology is not just about adopting new tools; it requires a strategic approach that aligns with business goals and fosters a culture of continuous improvement. Companies that are successful in their Cloud migration journeys programmatically plan and execute the three phases of migration (1/ Assess: build your case for change, 2/ Mobilize: build readiness, 3/ Migrate & Modernize: accelerate with the right strategy and best practices) while continuously evolving their Cloud Foundational capabilities in the process.
What are Cloud foundational capabilities
Your ability to effectively leverage the cloud to digitally transform and accelerate business outcomes is underpinned by a set of foundational capabilities. We define capability as an organizational ability to leverage processes and deploy resources (people, technology, and any other tangible or intangible assets) to achieve a particular outcome.
The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (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 and manage in your cloud transformation journey. The image below lists the 6 perspectives and the 47 foundational capabilities associated with each perspective.
Figure 1 – List of the 6 CAF perspectives and 47 foundational capabilities
The AWS CAF also provides best practice guidance that helps you measure and improve each of the aforementioned capabilities enhancing your ability to effectively leverage the cloud to digitally transform.
Understanding your capabilities proves most valuable in the early stages of cloud adoption, particularly during or before the Assess phase of Migration. The AWS Cloud Maturity Assessment (CMA) leverages the AWS CAF to evaluate the maturity of an organization’s cloud adoption efforts. By replacing intuition-based decision-making with data-driven analysis, the CMA offers prescriptive guidance and prioritized next steps. This approach equips organizations with a blueprint to effectively prioritize, build, and mature their cloud capabilities, ensuring a more strategic and efficient cloud adoption process.
Best practices for building Cloud capabilities
Since each organization’s cloud journey is unique, succeeding in your transformation requires you to adopt an agile approach to closing your capability gaps. Transforming incrementally will allow you to demonstrate value quickly while minimizing the need to make far-reaching predictions. Adopting an iterative approach will also help you maintain momentum and evolve your roadmap as you learn from experience. The AWS CAF recommends four iterative and incremental cloud transformation phases: 1/ Envision, 2/ Align, 3/ Launch, and 4/ Scale.
1. Envision (Assess phase of migration) – Developing your Case for Change
This phase focuses on demonstrating how the 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. Your organization’s Cloud Strategy should have defined, measurable, and expected business benefits while clearly articulating “Why Cloud?”. It is also in this phase where stakeholders are identified and KPIs to track progress are defined.
AWS has a series of mechanisms to help you and your organization develop your Cloud Strategy in direct support of your business goals and obtain alignment across all levels of your organization. One example is the CAF Envisioning Workshop used to identify clear business outcomes that align with organizational strategic goals, key stakeholders, success measures, and enabling technologies helping you identify, visualize, and prioritize cloud initiatives. Another example is the AWS Enterprise Transformation Program (ETP) which is a high-touch, comprehensive approach to help enterprise customers achieve their business goals by transforming their organization into an agile digital business, at an accelerated pace. In the initial phases of the ETP engagement, organizations identify their business goals and challenges, determine cloud readiness, and create a tailored cloud adoption strategy. The Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) Assess phase provides AWS investments to help customers assess their on-prem environment and develop a directional business case. AWS can also help you develop your case for change by building a data-driven business case for migration and modernization via AWS Migration Evaluator.
2. Align (Mobilize phase of migration) – Driving Change Alignment
This phase focuses on building alignment across all levels of the enterprise. Alignment is a critical factor that differentiates the organizations that are successful in driving transformative cloud adoption. It also includes identifying cross-organizational dependencies, and surfacing stakeholder concerns and challenges. These activities will help you create strategies for improving your cloud readiness, ensure stakeholder alignment, and facilitate organizational change management activities.
One example of AWS available mechanism to help you in this phase is the CAF Alignment Workshop which helps clarify/confirm the benefits of leveraging Cloud by your organization and stakeholders. The workshop drives clarity on what will be done and why. This helps surface and manage stakeholders’ concerns, and creates an action plan to begin achieving business outcomes and realizing business value. Through Discovery Acceleration and Planning (DAP), AWS provides customers deep infrastructure and application discovery and provides a directional R-Pattern recommendation to migrate and modernize workloads in line with your business goals. The Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA) enables organizations to assess and optimize current on-premises and cloud environments based on actual resources, utilization, and 3rd-party licensing, helping you optimize costs. In addition, AWS can also assist you in deploying a programmatic Organizational Change Management (OCM) approach focused on Leadership, Culture, Operating Model, Talent, and Governance. Organizations that deploy a programmatic approach for transformation typically capture 7X better outcomes in their cloud adoption journey.
3. Launch (Mobilize phase of migration) – Building Readiness Through Experience
This phase focuses on preparing the organization and mobilizing the resources needed for the migration. It includes developing your landing zone, delivering pilot initiatives, and demonstrating incremental business value. AWS has various available mechanisms that can help you in this phase.
First, the AWS Migration Hub delivers a guided end-to-end migration and modernization journey through discovery, assessment, planning, and execution. It offers the latest guidance, tools, and prescriptive plans from one location. This helps organizations build a migration and licensing strategy to unlock cost savings when migrating to AWS. The Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) Mobilize phase provides AWS investments to help customers assess their workloads and portfolio of applications, develop their landing zone, and migrate pilot applications. The Landing Zone Accelerator helps you deploy a cloud foundation to support highly-regulated workloads and complex compliance requirements. Platform Experience Based Acceleration (EBA) accelerates platform readiness and cloud foundations by co-locating AWS experts with your teams to develop your landing zone in a few days. AWS can also assess your workforce’s skills and develop individual upskilling plans through Learning Needs Analysis (LNA) and help you develop and implement a comprehensive upskilling program via AWS Skills Guild. AWS will also provide tailored hands-on learning through Immersion Days and Workshops. AWS can also guide you in creating and maturing your Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) to accelerate migrations to the cloud and broader digital transformation.
4. Scale (Migrate & Modernize phases) – Migrating, Modernizing, and Transforming at Scale
This 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.
The AWS Cloud Migration Factory helps you coordinate and automate large-scale migrations to the AWS Cloud. AWS has a number of free Cloud Migration Services to help you migrate and modernize your workloads. AWS can also help your teams accelerate hands-on delivery and reduce time to value by hosting Experienced Based Acceleration (EBA) migration and modernization parties where AWS SMEs work alongside your teams to accelerate delivery while upskilling your organization. The Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) Migrate and Modernize phase provides AWS investments to help customers migrate and modernize their workloads at scale. Well Architected Framework (WAF) Reviews helps you pro-actively review your workloads against the AWS Well-Architected Framework to build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure on AWS. Also, the Cloud Financial Management (CFM) assessment helps assess your organization’s FinOps maturity, identify gaps, and provide prescriptive guidance to improve your ability to manage and optimize your expenses using cloud services. One last example to share here is that you can leverage the AWS Cloud Value Framework to measure progress against your goals, assess the value of your Cloud investments, and adjust your Cloud adoption strategy and pace accordingly.
Conclusion
As demonstrated in this blog, organizations that deploy a programmatic approach to transformation typically capture 7X better outcomes in their cloud adoption journey. By leveraging the AWS Services and Tools outlined, organizations will continuously evolve their Cloud foundational capabilities as they progress through the three phases of migration. This comprehensive transformation of the organizational ecosystem – from technology and processes to people and culture – will enhance your organization’s ability to leverage cloud to innovate faster, operate more efficiently, and achieve your most critical business objectives.
Engage your AWS Account Team or reach out to us today to discuss how your organization can leverage AWS’s expertise and prescriptive guidance throughout your cloud journey. By partnering with AWS, you can ensure that you’re not just adopting cloud technology, but truly transforming your organization to thrive in the digital age.