The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework: Creating an Action Plan

Aleksandar Nenov
3 min readMar 13, 2018

Reference:https://aws.amazon.com/professional-services/CAF/

Download Guide: Creating an AWS CAF Action Plan

AWS CAF Action Plans help you prepare for the transition to cloud-based IT. The journey begins with your leadership team reviewing the six CAF perspectives. Each perspective is used to create work streams that uncover gaps in your existing skills and processes, which are recorded as inputs. These inputs are the basis for creating an AWS CAF Action Plan to guide your organization’s change management as you journey to the cloud.

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework — Action Plan Overview

The action plan is a key part of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF). The process of developing an action plan helps you voice challenges and concerns related to cloud adoption. Once created, the action plan aligns your organization with proactive solutions and helps you avoid pitfalls in the transition to a cloud-based IT model.

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework and Perspectives

Successful cloud transformations identify which organizational skills need to be updated and what new skills need to be learned. The AWS CAF supports and guides your organization as you create an effective cloud adoption plan to address these gaps. It provides guidance on six key perspectives common to businesses: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations. Each perspective is structured to address specific audiences and roles:

  • Business Perspective common roles: Business Managers, Finance Managers, Budget Owners, Strategy Stakeholders
  • People Perspective common roles: Human Resources, Staffing Managers, People Managers
  • Governance Perspective common roles: Chief Information Officer (CIO), Program Managers, Project Managers, Enterprise Architects, Business Analysts, Portfolio Managers
  • Platform Perspective common roles: Chief Technology Officer (CTO), IT Managers, Solution Architects
  • Security Perspective common roles: Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), IT Security Managers, IT Security Analysts
  • Operations Perspective common roles: IT Operations Managers, IT Support Managers

For example, the Business Perspective helps Business Managers, Finance Managers, Budget Owners, and Strategy Stakeholders understand how certain aspects of their roles may be altered by cloud adoption.

The action plan you create is based on the six perspectives.

Each AWS CAF perspective contains capabilities that are owned or managed by one or more functionally related stakeholders. As you review each perspective you begin to define how stakeholders in each functional area will update skills and processes to support a successful cloud adoption. This occurs in four steps:

  • Identify which stakeholders in your organization are critical to cloud adoption.
  • Understand the questions and concerns that may delay or impede cloud adoption for those stakeholders.
  • Identify skills or processes that you need to update to address those questions or concerns.
  • Create an action plan for updating the identified skills and/or processes.

Here is an example of a completed Action Plan Summary:

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