Tech Talk

AWS CAF is a framework of best practices and guidelines to step up an organization's shift to cloud computing. It provides an actionable plan to organizations and helps them understand the difference cloud adoption can make to their core processes and skills, and gives a structure to identify and fix gaps in those processes and skills required.

But you may think why is cloud computing so important for organizations? Cloud computing offers businesses the following advantages over legacy IT systems:

• Scalability: Depending on your IT requirements, you can upscale or downscale, as and when needed using cloud computing. If your business requirements grow or change, cloud computing allows you to ramp up your current resources to accommodate the increased business requirements or changes. This way without making costly changes to your current IT systems, you can easily support your business growth. With ever-changing technological changes, the legacy IT systems have almost transcended into obsolescence as these are not adept at empowering businesses to tune in with these rapid technological changes.

• Mobility: Unlike legacy IT systems that lack mobile capabilities, cloud computing ensures that no one is left uninformed by allowing employees anywhere, anytime mobile access to business data and applications via smartphones and other mobile devices.

• Speed: Legacy IT systems often lack speed and have multiple glitches. It may take loads of time to perform standard tasks. Speed-to-market is the biggest benefit of cloud computing. Generally, IT server provisioning consumes 6-8 weeks; however, cloud computing powers this to accelerate the process to only a few hours.

• Cost: Maintaining a legacy IT system may become more expensive than actually replacing the hardware and software. Whereas, IT cost savings are one of the most important benefits of cloud computing that requires no in-house server storage and application requirements. There are no additional operational costs due to lack of on-premises infrastructure. You pay for only what you use. It’s is affordable by all types of businesses – big or small.

• Reduced carbon footprint: The legacy IT systems required excessive hardware use. Even enterprises with mega budgets and big data centers have now begun to consider cloud as a viable alternative to run core business applications. With legacy IT systems, the TCO comes too high due to heavy administrative expenses. Since cloud facilitates less dependence on data centers and more efficient operations, it contributes in reducing carbon footprint to a significant extent.

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework is segregated into different focus areas (also called “perspectives”) that are critical to employing cloud-based IT systems. These different focus areas empower the businesses to ensure that all their enterprise processes are gearing in the right direction of planning, implementation and putting cloud-based IT capabilities into practice. The different areas of focus include:

• The Business Perspective: Helps stakeholders get the know-how of amping up the skill game of their staff and upgrade organizational processes to optimize business value as they migrate their operations to the cloud.

• The People Perspective: Offers guidance to stakeholders for people development, better training, and improved communications in appropriate time windows.

• The Governance Perspective: Provides guidance to stakeholders entrusted with the responsibility of supporting business processes with technology. Also aids stakeholders manage and measure cloud investments to assess their business results.
• The Platform Perspective: Helps stakeholders understand how to improve the skill sets of the staff skills and revitalize the organizational processes to deliver and optimize cloud solutions and services
• The Security Perspective: Helps stakeholders upgrade the staff skills and improve organizational processes to ensure that the cloud architecture deployed aligns to the organization’s security control and compliance requirements.
• The Operations Perspective: Facilitates stakeholders in updating the workforce skills and revamp organizational processes to ensure system health during the transition of operations to the cloud and then to operate using agile and cloud computing best practices.

Reaching Higher Standards of Computing with AWS

Jeff Bezos compared AWS to the utility companies of the early 1900s. Almost a century ago, when a company used to need electricity, it would focus on erecting its own power plant. However on the arrival of public utility companies, that company no longer needed the private electric plant and rather purchases it from the public utility company. AWS is mimicking the same model by making the company shift from physical computing to the cloud.

With AWS, your business can easily estimate the amount of resources needed for computing, storage, and networking. Such resources are readily available to your team within a few minutes. AWS makes it easy for the environment to be reconfigured, updated and scaled up or down quickly. It optimizes the spending and usage patterns too. AWS services steadily emerge as an operational expense, and not capital expense.

To transcend the cloud adoption journey, organizations need to discuss some fundamental changes and also the support of all stakeholders is required for the changes to be implemented successfully across the organization.

The AWS CAF provides a plan to address skill gaps, revamp current processes and introduce new ones in every function within your organization to leverage the full potential of cloud computing. A large number of organizations worldwide have successfully migrated to the cloud with AWS offering them with the required tools and resources at every step of the transition.