Build cloud capability across your organization

As you prepare to offer cloud as a service for your organization, you should consider identifying an owner who will sponsor the cloud adoption and they can build a team with the appropriate skill sets to deploy, operate, and govern the environment. As part of your foundation journey, we will be providing an estimated level of effort and the skill sets needed for building and operating each of the capabilities. To maximize the gains/outputs from your cloud initiatives, the Cloud Adoption Framework Governance perspective includes details to help you identify what needs to be done in these area.

As your cloud environment grows, responsibilities within your cloud environment will grow, and you need to ensure that you identify the appropriate owners to support the different workloads you will be deploying. Designating appropriate stakeholders to be aware of what is being built in your environment, to unblock your cloud team and your developer teams when they need to establish certain capabilities or deploy their workloads to the platform. When the appropriate stakeholders are identified early on, you will be enabled to make the right decisions for your environment faster. You can use the primary functional areas for the Cloud Foundations capabilities to identify stakeholders in your organization.

Once the different stakeholders are identified, we recommend you align them to the Shared Responsibility model. This will enable you to define a cloud operating model for your environment, where all the different teams involved in creating or enhancing your environment are aware of what needs to be done to move forward. Processes and standards are easier to manage, and they are visible across your organization.

Finally, as your organization grows, different teams will benefit from a training and certification program. This will allow the teams and stakeholders within your organization to stay up to date with the newest technologies, methodologies, and recommendations when managing your environment and the workloads running on it.

When establishing standards for your cloud environment, you need to define a home Region, where your data will be kept, and if there are any applicable region restrictions that need to be considered. You will also need to assign different stakeholders to each of the capabilities that need to be established in your environment according to your policy. This will enable you to establish a standard approve/deny process for new projects and workloads for your cloud environment.

Each team can create isolated environment for their workloads, in order to enable them to innovate and experiment. Different policies can match to different use cases in your environment, such as:

As you prepare to establish your environment, the cloud foundations capabilities will provide a guided path to establish an environment based on AWS Best Practices and Recommendations, that will enable you to implement each of these capabilities in your environment adhering to your Governance policies and requirements.

As you get started with your cloud provider, certain standards will allow you to simplify the management of your cloud environment, such as setting up standards and roles that the teams will use to interact with the cloud provider, defining different namespaces and email addresses for each team to use when accessing the environment and what is the level of internal support within your organization and from the cloud provider.

Other standards that we walk you through within other capabilities will allow you to define and develop mechanisms such as:

Establishing capabilities and standardizing process across your organization following an operating model you define, enables your teams to start realizing the benefit and power of the cloud, and will allow them to innovate faster and focus on key business differentiators, freeing them for complex and repetitive administrative task to manage their environment(s).