The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Transformation Maturity Model (CTMM) enables enterprises to self-assess their cloud adoption maturity through four stages: project, foundation, migration, and optimization. Each stage encompasses a set of transformation activities and associated outcomes and “milestones of maturity. However, the transformation journey can be complicated, especially for smaller firms and companies with inexperienced IT teams. 

To reduce the overwhelm for these and other customers, AWS has designed a Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF). The AWS CAF is a set of best practices and guidelines that enable organizations to seamlessly navigate and complete the cloud adoption process. These practices are based on the AWS team’s experience with cloud migration and digital transformation. By using the CAF, companies can improve their cloud-readiness and move on to the next stage of cloud maturity.

Why Organizations Are Moving to the AWS Cloud

In a hyper-dynamic business landscape, organizations need support to improve operational efficiencies, cut costs, and sustain a competitive advantage. Many realize that they must adopt modern digital technologies to seamlessly adapt to changing market conditions, meet customer expectations, and achieve their business goals. One of the most popular digital technologies is of course cloud computing.

The cloud enables companies in all kinds of industries to improve service delivery, reduce expenses, and increase enterprise agility and resilience. They can respond faster to evolving conditions and trends, and accelerate time-to-market and time-to-value. Several cloud service providers operating today, but Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the clear winner, holding a 33% share of a $50 billion cloud market in Q1, 2022.

AWS enables startups, medium-sized companies, and large enterprises to increase agility, lower costs, and drive innovation at every level of the business. Millions of these firms leverage the AWS cloud and its vast portfolio of products and services to:

• Migrate and modernize legacy applications and workloads
• Take effective data-driven decisions
• Digitize, automate, and optimize business processes
• Reinvent operating and business models

AWS cloud-powered transformation also enables organizations to reduce business risks, create new revenue streams, and enhance customer experiences. Any company can achieve these goals, as long as have a set of foundational capabilities to effectively leverage the AWS cloud.

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework identifies these capabilities and also provides prescriptive guidance to help organizations successfully migrate to AWS and achieve desired outcomes with cloud transformation.

Next, let’s understand how the AWS CTTM works and how the AWS CAF can help you progress along your cloud maturity journey.

What is the AWS Cloud Transformation Maturity Model?

The AWS CTTM provides a way to identify migration challenges early and leverage AWS best practices and guidance to successfully drive value from your cloud transformation efforts. The model describes four key stages that an organization goes through along its cloud maturity. These are described below:

i. Project stage

You will begin your transformation journey at this initial stage. At this point, your IT team will have little or no knowledge of cloud services and its potential costs and benefits. They may also resist changing to the cloud model. You likely won’t have a centralized cloud adoption strategy, and executive leaders may resist providing new funding for cloud services.

You must overcome these barriers to mature to the next maturity stage of foundation. And to do this, make sure to complete all these transformation activities:

• Connect with an AWS account manager to find an AWS Partner like Axcess that can help address your cloud needs
• Invest in AWS training resources for your stakeholders
• Get executive support and funding
• Explore AWS purchase options:
  • Directly from AWS
  • Indirectly from an AWS Partner
• Execute a proof of concept (POC) project to gain deeper insights into AWS implementation on representative workloads

After completing these activities, you can start getting ready to begin the activities for the next stage.

ii. Foundation stage

At this stage, your organization lacks a detailed cloud transformation plan and has limited knowledge of the cloud’s security and compliance paradigms. However, you do intend to move forward with AWS migration. To support your needs, make sure to identify transformation support resources, develop a transformation plan, assess the existing environment, and create contractual agreements.

To mature to the next stage (migration), it can be helpful to:

• Establish a cloud center of excellence (CCoE) to standardize the cloud strategy, technical processes, and procedures throughout the enterprise
• Develop a security and compliance architecture with the help of AWS Professional Services
• Develop a value management plan detailing the expected tactical benefits (e.g., cost optimization) and strategic value (e.g., improved agility)
• Create a transformation roadmap detailing the planning, resourcing, and migration activities

iii. Migration stage

At this stage, your organization has a strong governance, technical, and operational foundation to efficiently migrate targeted applications and in-scope workloads. However, you may face project delays, budget overruns, and application failures. To avoid these risks, make sure to:

• Complete a portfolio rationalization exercise to determine which applications to migrate, replace, or eliminate
• Determine the appropriate migration strategy for moving each application to the AWS cloud: retire, retain, re-host, re-platform, repurchase, refactor
• Develop a detailed migration process and environment for each workload
• Select proven AWS proven migration tools and methods to streamline the migration process and implement a reliable cloud environment
• Implement a cloud governance and operating model to streamline access, security, compliance, and automation

iv. Optimization stage

Reaching the optimization stage indicates that your organization has successfully migrated all targeted application workloads and can efficiently manage the AWS environment. It also means that you can optimize existing processes and successfully drive cost and performance efficiencies.

To remain in this stage – which is not a final destination but an ongoing loop – make sure that you implement continuous processes for cost optimization, operation management optimization, application service optimization, and enterprise service optimization.

What is the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework?

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework will help you overcome challenges in your cloud maturity and readiness journey. It provides best practice guidance that will enable your team to execute a comprehensive plan to achieve digital transformation and improve enterprise cloud-readiness. The current version of the AWS CAF is 3.0.

CAF 3.0 identifies six groups or “perspectives” of capabilities:

1. Business: Ensures ensure that cloud investments accelerate digital transformation and business outcomes
2. People: Enables the organization to evolve a culture of continuous growth and learning
3. Governance: Essential to maximize cloud benefits and minimize transformation-related risks
4. Platform: Helps you build a scalable cloud platform and modernize existing workloads
5. Security: Vital to maintain the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of cloud workloads
6. Operations: Ensures that cloud services satisfy your business needs

It also identifies 47 discrete capabilities across these perspectives. For example, strategy management and product management are part of the Business perspective, while workforce transformation and organizational alignment fall under the People perspective. Similarly, risk management belongs to Governance and platform architecture and platform engineering belong to Platform, while vulnerability management and patch management fall under Security and Operations, respectively. Functionally related stakeholders own and manage these capabilities along the organization’s cloud transformation journey.

The CAF also identifies four transformation domains:

1. Technology: It focuses on using the AWS cloud to modernize legacy infrastructure, applications, and data and analytics platforms.
2. Process: Transformation focused on focuses on digitizing and automating business operations to improve operational efficiency and lower operating costs
3. Organization: Transformation that involves reimagining the operating model to create customer value
4. Product: Product transformation is about creating new value and revenue models to reach new customers and enter new market segments.

Together, these four transformational domains represent a “cloud transformation value chain” that results in four key business outcomes for successful digital transformation:

• Reduced business risk
• Improved environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance
• Increased revenue
• Improved operational efficiency

Based on these capabilities and transformation domains, the AWS CAF recommends four iterative and incremental cloud transformation phases. These phases encompass all the transformational domains and foundational capabilities that constitute the CAF:

1. Envision Phase: Demonstrate how the cloud will accelerate business outcomes by identifying transformation opportunities based on your business objectives.
2. Align Phase: Identify capability gaps across the six CAF perspectives, cross-organizational dependencies, and stakeholder concerns.
3. Launch Phase: Deliver pilot initiatives in production and demonstrate incremental business value.
4. Scale Phase: Expand production pilot to the desired scale and sustain the cloud’s business benefits.

By adopting this iterative approach, you can maintain momentum during your cloud transformation journey and evolve the roadmap as you learn across each maturity phase.

Leverage the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework to Make the Most of the AWS Cloud

AWS can empower your organization to successfully adapt to the dynamic business environment and satisfy evolving customer expectations. Leverage its wide ecosystem of solutions to lower costs, reduce risks, improve operational efficiency, and become more agile and resilient. The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) is the best way to migrate to AWS and take advantage of its features. The CAF brings you AWS experience and best practices to leverage AWS in order to improve cloud readiness and accelerate business outcomes.

If you need help understanding the AWS CAF or how to best use it to guide your cloud transformation, contact Axcess.io. As an AWS Consulting Partner, we have helped dozens of organizations migrate successfully to AWS.