Best practice for Cloud Adoption with AWS

There are a number of reasons why a business should consider adopting a cloud infrastructure. Over the years, the cloud has moved from a choice some businesses make to an essential component of any business that wants to remain efficient, innovative and agile.

A cloud programme is one of the biggest technology shifts your company will make and, as such, it is important that you follow best practices for cloud adoption. The cloud allows an unprecedented level of scalability for your business but it also comes with its own set of challenges to be aware of.

In this blog post, we cover the best practices for cloud adoption with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS cloud computing services provide distributed computing processing capacity and software tools to users via AWS server farms. AWS includes a mix of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and packaged software as a service (SaaS) offerings, all customised to suit your business needs.

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) includes a set of best practices to help you leverage the AWS cloud to drive innovation and achieve success within the business.

The framework identifies specific organisational capabilities that then provide best practice guidance to improve your company’s cloud readiness. Those capabilities are grouped into six distinct categories: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations.

Each of these categories, or perspectives, includes a set of capabilities that certain stakeholders own and manage within your cloud transformation journey. Defining these perspectives, in the context of your organisation, is vital to the success of your cloud implementation.

Using the AWS CAF, you can identify and prioritise transformation opportunities as well as evaluate and assess whether your company is cloud-ready. It’ll also guide the creation of your cloud roadmap.

The framework is comprised of four main steps:

Envision

This initial step is about identifying and prioritising transformation opportunities within the business, in line with your objectives.

Align

This step will identify any gaps in capability and any cross-organisational dependencies. This will help you create a strategy to ensure your company is cloud-ready, as well as guarantee stakeholder alignment.

Launch

This phase includes the delivery of pilots in production, which demonstrate incremental business value. These pilots will help you finetune your strategy before going into full production.

Scale

In this stage, you expand pilots and business value to suit your business and ensure that it meets the needs of your strategy and that the cloud implementation achieves the benefits set out at the beginning of the process.

Best practices for AWS Cloud adoption

While the specific needs of your business will set the terms of your cloud implementation journey, some best practices generally apply across the board. Any business moving into the cloud with AWS should, among other things:

Engage and educate staff – A lack of staff engagement in the process is likely to become a roadblock so cloud education should be top of mind. A good approach to getting your cloud adoption journey in motion is to establish a centralised cloud center of excellence (CCOE). The CCoE is a team of passionate experts who will drive both education and engagement.
Adopt a cloud governance model – Outline everyone’s roles, as well as levels of access and security. Identify the IT assets you own and that you’re including in each migration. This will help you measure the success of your cloud adoption.
Create a culture of experimentation – The cloud can enable organisations to create a culture centred around research and development. With the cloud being optimised for automation and taking a pay-what-you-use approach, it provides an enhanced level of flexibility for well-established enterprises to develop innovative projects and remain competitive.
Implement a Cloud First policy – This refers to the guidelines embedded within an organisation that prioritise cloud services over legacy systems, especially in regard to new applications, platforms and infrastructure.
Adopt and enforce a strong set of security practices – Ensuring strong security should be top of mind for organisations. AWS outlines a number of principles for security in the cloud, including implementing a strong identity management foundation, enabling traceability and applying security at all layers.
Test everything – During your cloud migration, every application component should go through a series of predetermined and well-documented tests.