Get started with Azure landing zones and assess your cloud environment
The Cloud Adoption Framework is proven guidance that’s designed to help you create and implement the business and technology strategies necessary for your organization to succeed in the cloud. It provides best practices, documentation, and tools that cloud architects, IT professionals, and business decision makers need to successfully achieve their short- and long-term objectives. By following Cloud Adoption Framework best practices, organizations more effectively align their business and technical strategies to ensure success.
Address the deployment and operations needs of your cloud portfolio through scalable, modular implementation options to build out your cloud environment.
Begin the cloud adoption process by reviewing your Azure platform readiness. Assess your plan to create a landing zone that will host the workloads that you build in the cloud or migrate to the cloud.
The Cloud Adoption Strategy Evaluator will provide you with a framework to understand different areas needed when building your cloud strategy and business case and guide you to actionable next steps.
Find the best apps and data modernization strategy for you. Accelerate time to market and deliver innovative customer experiences with an accurate assessment of your internal- and external-facing apps.
Use the Strategic Migration Assessment and Readiness Tool to understand your organization’s preparedness to implement a cloud migration solution at scale.
Use this assessment to help you identify gaps in your organization’s current state of governance. Get a personalized benchmark report and curated guidance on how to get started.
Get expert guidance as you plan and execute organizational and technical changes while mitigating risks.
Manage organizational changes
Find sustainable ways for your organization to embrace cloud technology.
Adopt technologies for business growth
Discover and learn to implement secure cloud technologies that scale to grow with your business.
Enhance security
Capture risks, plan controls, set your security baseline, and operate safely with proven guidance.
Establish governance and optimize costs
Establish budgets, monitor cost allocation patterns, set policies, and implement controls to optimize your cloud spending and deployment.
The cloud adoption journey
There's no single cloud adoption path that works for every organization, but the main implementation stages of a secure methodology are similar for all organizations and industries.
Understand motivations
Understand cloud economics and get the financial and technical tips to help develop your cloud strategy and build your business case.
Establish clear business outcomes that align with your motivations. Use the business outcome template to align stakeholders and decision makers on deciding which outcomes to prioritize.
Catalog all your workloads, applications, data sources, virtual machines, and other IT assets and evaluate them to determine the best way to host them in the cloud.
Create and implement a skills readiness plan to define support needs, address current gaps, and ensure that your business and IT employees are prepared for the changes and new technologies.
Move existing on-premises applications to the cloud based on an incremental process. Starts with an initial, limited-scope cloud migration effort before expanding to move more workloads as you learn from the initial experience and improve your migration processes.
Modernize your digital estate to drive business and product innovation. Modern approaches to infrastructure deployment, operations, and governance are rapidly bridging the gaps between development and operations.
Identify gaps in your organization’s transformation journey, benchmark and track your governance state over time, and get recommendations, such as documentation, courses, partner solutions, and customized guidance from Azure engineering.
Implement a governance minimally viable product (MVP) to establish initial governance practices based on the cloud governance disciplines of cost management, security baseline, resource consistency, identity baseline, and deployment automation.
Identify business risks and define risk tolerances
Identify business risks and your risk tolerance and mitigate those risks with governance and compliance policies. Implement recurring governance processes to monitor policy adherence.
The cloud adoption framework methodology for management classifies all workloads by criticality and business value, and measures them through an impact analysis, which calculates the lost value of performance degradation or business interruptions.
Guide your security program with a vision of the complete end state from the secure methodology, including integrating security insights into a risk management framework, supporting business resilience, and protecting sensitive data and systems.
Although the cloud isn’t new, the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure creates new business management and technology opportunities. It provides tools and guidance for implementing cloud technologies and business and processes changes that empower organizations to adopt Azure with confidence and control. Based on best practices and successful customer and partner experiences, the framework is regularly updated to stay current.
The Cloud Adoption Framework is available worldwide.
Cloud adoption is a companywide decision, so the Cloud Adoption Framework is designed to support IT administrators, cloud architects, and business decision makers across your organization.
Each organization’s cloud adoption journey is unique, with no one-size-fits-all approach. However, most journeys share common steps, which the Cloud Adoption Framework addresses in a modular format, allowing you to begin wherever you are in the process. Use the Cloud Journey Tracker assessment to pinpoint your organization’s path or connect with a partner to help you get started.
Assessments let you quickly identify the best approach to cloud adoption for your organization. They provide recommendations based on your needs and anyone in your organization can review them at their convenience. In addition to pinpointing your cloud adoption needs, these assessments help you define your governance benchmark and evaluate your workloads.
Next steps
Accelerate your cloud adoption journey
Evaluate your business strategies and receive curated guidance from Microsoft Assessments.