When organizations embark on moving their IT to the cloud there are a lot of things to consider, decide upon, learn about, and implement. I often point people in the direction of the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework which is a consolidation of best practices from Microsoft employees, customers, and partners to help them deal with their Cloud Adoption challenges.

I’ve pulled together five practical reasons taking a look at the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) is appropriate for everyone embarking on their Cloud journey, whether they are just starting or already using the Cloud.

Building a business case and getting the buy in from the senior leadership team for a Cloud project can be a massive milestone, the Strategy section within the CAF can help guide you on that process and help provide guidance on what project would be a great one to start with.



Now that you’ve decided to put workloads within the Cloud you need to start to build up the infrastructure in which your workload will reside. For example, to host a virtual machine in Azure you need to have a network with subnets etc in place. You’ll often hear this referred to as a Landing Zone, or Minimal Viable Product. To understand the pieces of the puzzle that need to be in place the Ready section within the CAF has you covered.



Often when I speak to organizations about moving to the Cloud, a concern is something going wrong, either by costing them a small fortune by deploying something wrongly or by leaving a security hole open by mistake. This is where the Governance section can really help. Implementing Cloud Governance isn’t about stifling innovation or the leadership stopping their employees doing their job it’s more often than not avoiding accidental deployments of one of those really LARGE expensive virtual machines by mistake.



Moving to the Cloud is technology and cultural learning curve for organizations. Everyone within the organization has something to learn, whether that be end users understanding new support workflows or IT staff learning how Azure networking works. The Manage section of the CAF can help you understand what you need to focus on and how to implement those new changes.



We are all aware of best practices and have lots of experience on how to architect workloads on prem, we’ve all been doing it for years. And a lot of those best practices are still relevant today but there are some changes we need to think about and be aware of. Within the CAF the Innovate section has some guidance on what you need to think about.





As I mentioned the Cloud Adoption Framework is collaborative, so if you spot any mistakes, or want to contribute to it you can as it’s open source.

There is also a Cloud Adoption Framework module at Microsoft Learn that you can use to learn more about the framework.

And please do reach out with stories of how the CAF has helped your organization adopt the cloud, we’d love to hear them!