Organizational readiness

Organizational readiness is a critical factor for maximizing value in the cloud. Organizations that assess their gaps early and put in place the right transformation plans have significantly higher chances of achieving their business goals when moving to the cloud.

Some of the most common blockers for cloud value realization for customers include:

At AWS, we have helped thousands of organizations in their cloud adoption and have captured our experience and best practices through different frameworks and tools.

In the following section, we introduce how you can organize your key people around cloud adoption through the Cloud Center of Excellence.

Then, we cover the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), which covers the 6 key organizational capabilities that underpin successful cloud transformations, as well as the Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool, a self-service assessment for your organization to measure alignment against the six perspectives of the CAF.

Finally, in the Cloud Operations section, we go through some resources to ensure your organization can operate your workloads in the cloud securely and reliably.

Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE)

The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), also known as Cloud Enablement Engine (CEE) is a multi-disciplinary team in charge of implementing the governance, best practices, training, and architecture needed for cloud adoption in a manner that provides repeatable patterns for the larger enterprise to follow. The CCoE team is made up of the Cloud Business Office (CBO) and the Cloud Platform Engineering (CPE), and is governed by the Cloud executive team. The team can be global, local, or federated (though some capabilities may be local and others global). In a migration context, the CCoE is typically started in the Mobilize Phase . For more resources, see Accelerating cloud adoption through culture, change, and leadership . You can also watch the video How to Manage Organizational Change and Cultural Impact During a Cloud Transformation .

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF)

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) leverages AWS experience and best practices to help you digitally transform and accelerate your business outcomes through innovative use of AWS. AWAWSS CAF identifies specific organizational capabilities that underpin successful cloud transformations. These capabilities provide best-practice guidance that helps you improve your cloud readiness. AWS CAF groups its capabilities in six perspectives: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations. Each perspective comprises a set of capabilities that functionally related stakeholders own or manage in the cloud transformation journey. Use the AWS CAF to identify and prioritize transformation opportunities, evaluate and improve your cloud readiness, and iteratively evolve your transformation roadmap.

Cloud Readiness Assessment (CRA)

No matter which stage your organization is in on the cloud journey, it is never too late to assess your cloud readiness. The AWS Cloud Readiness Assessment (CRA) is a free self-service online assessment tool to evaluate your cloud readiness and identify gaps and opportunities against the AWS CAF capabilities, across six perspectives. The outcome is a detailed report with recommended actions to help your organization achieve the maximum benefits of cloud adoption.

Cloud Maturity Assessment (CMA)

The AWS CMA is a maturity model that tracks the adoption of a customer's cloud transformation over time. It uses AWS CAF's foundational organizational capabilities that underpin an organization's ability to leverage the cloud to digitally transform in the cloud. It is an assessment led by AWS with the inputs from your organization to identify risks and create an engagement and risk mitigation plan in support of achieving customer goals. The results are tracked over time, and can be benchmarked, and thus used as an important input for decision making. Reach out to your AWS account team, or book a meeting with a migration expert directly to walk you through the CMA assessment process.

Cloud Operations

Operating your applications in the cloud is different from operating them on-premises (whether in your own data centers or in co-location). In your cloud migration journey, your organization will gradually pivot towards a Cloud Operating Model. The Well-Architected Framework - Operational Excellence Pillar can be very useful when designing your cloud operating model based on your Application Engineering and Operations (AEO) and Infrastructure Engineering Operations (AEO) teams. To learn more about Cloud Operating Models, watch the Cloud Operating Models for Accelerated Transformation video.

For additional guidance around capabilities needed to operate in the cloud, see AWS Cloud Adoption Framework: Operations Perspective .

For prescriptive guidance on how to build your own Cloud Operating Model according to the AWS definition, see Building your Cloud Operating Model . For tips on how to make sure the platform that you build is effective in supporting your application development teams, see How to Set Up a Platform That Effectively Supports Your Development Teams .

Maturity of cloud operations

You can assess and improve the maturity of your cloud operations with the help of the Well-Architected Tool . The tool makes it easy for your teams to review a given application against the best practices of the Operational Excellence and Security pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Cloud Operations can be improved with AWS GameDays , AWS Workshops , Table Top simulations and Well-Architected Labs . For more details, explore the Education and Enablement topic.

Additional resources

Watch the following video from AWS re:Invent 2022: Transforming with AWS Cloud Operations: From vision to reality

The following two-part blog provides the foundational tooling that will help you centralize and automate operations, and improve governance and visibility through AWS Cloud Operations services: Increase visibility and governance on cloud with AWS Cloud Operations services – part 1 and part 2 .

Cloud financial management and FinOps

Understanding the processes around how resources are priced and consumed in the cloud is one of the critical capabilities that need to be developed during your migration. AWS Cloud Financial Management can help you find initial resources and guidance on how to start and evolve your Cloud Financial Management capability and FinOps. To dive deeper into this topic, watch the following AWS re:Invent video that discusses the practice: Making dollars and sense out of FinOps.

For a customer case study, see How Cvent saved over $3M in less than two years by creating a cost-aware culture