AWS Cloud Adoption Framework: Business Perspective

Publication date: August 26, 2022 (Document revisions)

Abstract

As the proliferation of digital technologies continues to disrupt market segments and industries, adopting Amazon Web Services (AWS) can help you transform your organization to meet the changing business conditions and evolving customer needs. As the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, AWS can help you reduce business risk, improve environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance, increase revenue, and improve operational efficiency.

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) uses AWS experience and best practices to help you digitally transform and accelerate your business outcomes through innovative use of AWS. Use AWS CAF to identify and prioritize transformation opportunities, evaluate and improve your cloud readiness, and iteratively evolve your transformation roadmap.

AWS CAF groups its guidance in six perspectives: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations. Each perspective is covered in a separate whitepaper. This whitepaper covers the Business perspective, which focuses on ensuring that your cloud investments accelerate your digital transformation ambitions and business outcomes.

Are you Well-Architected?

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand the pros and cons of the decisions you make when building systems in the cloud. The six pillars of the Framework allow you to learn architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable systems. Using the AWS Well-Architected Tool, available at no charge in the AWS Management Console, you can review your workloads against these best practices by answering a set of questions for each pillar.

For more expert guidance and best practices for your cloud architecture—reference architecture deployments, diagrams, and whitepapers—refer to the AWS Architecture Center.

Introduction

Rapid diffusion of digital technologies has accelerated change and increased competition across a range of market segments and industries. Because sustaining any particular competitive advantage has become increasingly difficult, enterprises are being forced to reinvent themselves at increasingly shorter time intervals.

As democratized access to cloud lowers barriers to entry, emerging companies are challenging slower-moving incumbents, potentially disrupting traditionally stable industries. Studies have shown that the average tenure of companies on the S&P 500 has been decreasing and has been projected to drop from a high of more than 35 years in the early 1980s to 12 years by 2027. Accordingly, digital transformation is especially relevant for established enterprises that are being forced to reimagine their legacy operating and business models.

Digital transformation is equally relevant for public sector organizations as citizens’ evolving expectations and behaviors are putting pressure on governments to improve digital service delivery. Similarly, digital native businesses, which depend on the quality and speed of their innovation, cannot afford to stand still and need to engage in continuous digital transformation. As a result, organizations across the globe are digitally transforming; they are using digital technologies, and increasingly cloud, to drive organizational change that allows them to adapt to changing business conditions and meet evolving customer needs.

McKinsey has estimated that cloud could deliver more than $1 trillion across Fortune 500 companies by 2030, with early adopters capturing a disproportionate share of the total value. This includes potentially more than $400 billion in modernization-related use-cases focusing on application and infrastructure cost optimization, improved business resilience, lower downtime costs, and digitization of core business operations, as well as more than $700 billion in innovation-related use-cases aimed at innovation-driven growth, accelerated product development, and hyper scalability.

Millions of AWS customers, including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government organizations, are using AWS to migrate and modernize legacy workloads, become data-driven, automate and optimize business processes, and reinvent operating and business models.

Through cloud-powered digital business transformation, they are able to improve their business outcomes, including reduce business risk, improve environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance, increase revenue, and improve operational efficiency.

Organizational ability to effectively leverage cloud to digitally transform (organizational cloud readiness) is underpinned by a set of foundational capabilities. A capability is an organizational ability to use processes to deploy resources (people, technology, and any other tangible or intangible assets) to achieve a particular outcome. AWS CAF identifies these capabilities and provides prescriptive guidance that thousands of organizations around the world have successfully used to improve their cloud readiness and accelerate their cloud transformation journeys.

AWS CAF groups its capabilities in six perspectives:

Each perspective comprises a set of capabilities that functionally related stakeholders own or manage in their cloud transformation journey.

The Business perspective helps ensure that your cloud investments accelerate your digital transformation ambitions and their aligned business outcomes. It comprises eight capabilities shown in the figure below. Common stakeholders include chief executive officer (CEO), chief financial officer (CFO), chief operations officer (COO), chief information officer (CIO), chief marketing officer (CMO), chief product officer (CPO), and chief technology officer (CTO).

AWS and the AWS Partner Network provide tools and services that can help you along each step of the way. AWS Professional Services is a global team of experts that provides assistance through a collection of AWS CAF aligned offerings that can help you achieve specific outcomes relating to your cloud transformation.