The Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF Framework) is a collection of documentation, implementation guidance, best practices, and tools that are proven guidance from Microsoft designed to accelerate your cloud adoption journey. There are six stages to the CAF framework, and each stage has been crafted to help you accelerate your cloud adoption journey. Think of the CAF framework as your guide to making the most of your Azure investment.

It’s important to note that the CAF framework isn’t just for businesses that are new to the cloud, it can be used by businesses at any stage of their cloud journey. And we’re here to help you understand how you can start using it.

What are the six stages of the Cloud Adoption Framework?

1. Strategy
   Start by understanding your business objectives to identify how Azure can support them. Microsoft has created a Cloud Journey Tracker to help identify the adoption path suited for your business.
2. Plan
   Start aligning your people, processes, and technology to map out your cloud adoption plan. This is where you rationalize your current estate using the 5 R’s of application modernisation.
3. Ready
   This is where you prepare your environment using the Azure Setup Guide created by Microsoft. Once you’re all prepared it’s time to deploy your landing zone – a basic building block of any migration.
4. Adopt
   The adopt stage is split out into two parts – migrate and innovate. You can simply migrate your on-premises environment to the cloud. This is used when your workloads don’t warrant investment. Or you can innovate where you take advantage of cloud-native technologies to modernise your digital state using DevOps.
5. Govern
   Create benchmarks and implement a governance minimum variable product to stay on track. Working with an Azure Expert MSP can help you govern your environment, helping you maintain your progress.
6. Manage
   Monitor your environment through data collection and alerts. Manage it to ensure your following best practices to track your performance. And make sure you’ve created a resilient platform that can recover from any issues.

The Beginners Guide to the Cloud Adoption Framework

Want to find out more about the Cloud Adoption Framework? We’ve put together a comprehensive Beginners Guide to the Cloud Adoption Framework, to help you understand in more detail what you should be doing, things you should be considering and resources you should be utilising at each stage. Want to find out more? Read a copy of our guide today – written by our very own Azure Experts.