So we have identified the first perspectives more related to our business company: business perspective, people perspective and governance perspective. Now we will go on with the rest of AWS perspectives for the Cloud Adoption Framework which are more related to technical aspects that we need to take into account.

Once collecting all the information for these three perspectives, we´ll gather enough data to set up a clear Actionable Plan. With this in mind, we assume “Envisioning” and “Alignment” as steps already done in our AWS journey to the cloud. Afterwards we will be ready to afford “Launch” where we need a vertical slicing of the cake as AWS says. I mean, a prototype where stakeholders from different company´s areas are involved. With that way we reduce risk and we take advantage of frequent delivery of usable chunks for other workloads to be migrated later to the cloud.

Let´s go on then with the last three perspectives more technical and the stakeholders which are part of them:

• Platform Perspective: Chief Technology Officer (CTO), IT Managers, Solution Architects.
• Security Perspective: Chief Information Security Officer, (CISO), IT Security Managers, IT Security Analysts.
• Operations Perspective: IT Operations Managers, IT Support Managers, Outsourcing partners which maintain the current applications and IT services.

Platform Perspective: This perspective will identify the needs of network, compute or storage provisioning to move the workloads identified on the prototype in the actionable plan. But also database, systems and architecture or application transformations needed to be more efficient solutions in the cloud. This second part is more complex as may involve CI/CD redesigning in some process or current software development.

Security Perspective This perspective shape the identity and access management mechanisms to provide access with double factor authentication, less privileges policies and granularity on permissions. Provides detective controls to gather logs and correlate them in the right way to get a real view of the security posture. Facilite automation security controls in the infrastructure based on the “Desired Configuration State” and finally how the data protection and incident response should be address on the prototype and afterwards in the next workload to be move to the cloud.

Operations Perspective: This perspective defines all the current processes in terms of maintenance and identifies the processes to be change and training needed to implement a successful cloud adoption. This is done in terms of monitoring, business continuity strategy like backup or disaster recovery, patching and general operational daily task to be changed, replace or remove for the IT Staff within the company.

Therefore, with the six perspectives templates filled out and a lot of information about each business area, current processes and skills, we are ready for starting with our action plan. Let´s go with the next step that we´ve mentioned in the introduction in this post.

Launch the first workload or you prototype is the armageddon of your digital transformation within the customer´s company. You should be able to understand their business from A to Z.

To get the best from east and west use the “Vertical Slicing strategy of the cake”. That means you´ll involve as much stakeholders as possible from several areas with less or more impact to get absolute visibility of the transformation, the innovation that you bring to them and how you accelerate the outcomes. Also, that reduces the risk of the effort done, improves the perceptions in the whole company, and facilitate the frequent delivery of usable chunks for new migrations.

Vertical Slicing of the cake

Remember the work streams (current processes and skills to manage them within the company) with this approach will draw the interdependence between areas for the same AWS perspective or others. So vertical slicing will bring more results on how to address future challenges when moving more workload to the cloud as you can detect stoppers, revolutionary improvements or people opinions of what you have done.

In the coming post, we´ll drill down on the same phases but focus on the Microsoft CAF. Once we explain the same steps we´ll compare very quick both CAF methodologies.

Enjoy the journey to the cloud with me…see you then in the next post.