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-term 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-facing 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.
Adoption scenarios based on the Cloud Adoption Framework
Get adoption guidance tailored for your chosen technology
Obtain expert guidance as you plan and execute organizational and technical changes while mitigating risks. Learn and benefit from a repository of successful cloud adoption scenarios and best practices.
Discover best practices for AI Adoption
Learn how to adopt and maintain AI with this roadmap for startups and enterprises.
Enable rapid innovation with a modern application platform
Prepare for Kubernetes and container integration into centralized operations and your broader cloud strategy.
Enhance security
Capture risks, plan controls, set your security baseline, and operate safely with proven guidance.
Establish governance and optimize costs
Determine 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.
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Understand motivations
Understand business outcomes and get financial best practices 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. Start 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. Mitigate those risks with governance and compliance policies. Implement recurring governance processes to monitor policy adherence.
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.
See how customers are accelerating their cloud adoption journey
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“We see Chip as a very exciting start to an exciting journey. Adoption will continue to grow, as will the power of these models—enabling us to go and solve our customers biggest problems.”
David Sturdee, Chief Customer Officer, Howdens
“We’ve halved our SAP hosting cost since we started our Azure journey, and through deployments of high-availability architectures, we’ve reduced ERP unavailability to our business by 95%.”
Gaurav Shridhar, Head of ERP Service Assurance and Operations, Haleon
“The people who start working with us now will never know the old on-premises world, so our Azure deployment makes a huge difference in their ability to run environments by themselves in the most cost-efficient way.”
Sofia Hagberg, Head of Digital Platforms and Data Innovation, Aurobay
“We have in Microsoft a partner who shares our goal of creating a hybrid infrastructure. In addition, Microsoft offers us good ideas, from design studies and proofs of concept to advising on project partner selection,”
Tobias Steinig, Senior Vice President, Global IT operations and infrastructure, DEKRA
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.
Next steps
Accelerate your cloud adoption journey
Evaluate your business strategies and receive curated guidance from Microsoft Assessments.