Skip to main content

Tools, templates and assessments for the Define strategy phase of CAF (Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework)

Microsoft is offering an excellent framework to support cloud migration and adoption process – Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) 

The framework defined an iterative process with the following phases:

  1. Define Strategy
  2. Plan
  3. Ready
  4. Adopt
  5. Govern
  6. Manage

For each of them, Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) provides us a list of templates, tools, and assessment mechanisms that can help us improve the adoption and migration process. Let's take a look at the ones for Define Strategy.


Define Strategy Tools, Assessments, and Templates

Cloud journey tracker

Location: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/assessments  

The primary purpose of this assessment is to help us identify how we should do Azure's adoption. The assessment identifies areas of the CAF framework that are relevant for our adoption of the migration journey.

There are in total 8 questions that can be covered in around 15 minutes, covering areas like adoption strategy, plan, ready, govern, and manage. The assessment helps us identify where we are now from the cloud maturity level and the adoption areas (e.g., strategy, plan, ready, govern, manage).

The output of the assessment provides us scoring that takes into account what kind of cloud adoption we want to make. Additionally, it provides a list of recommended actions that we can take to improve our understanding of the cloud journey and the business objectives that we want to achieve for each area. 

The information is valuable if you are at the beginning of the journey and you have a basic experience with the cloud and how to adopt it. 

 

Business outcome template

Location: https://archcenter.blob.core.windows.net/cdn/business-outcome-template.xlsx

The Excel template provides us the ability to collect the adoption outcomes that we want to achieve. Each business outcome has 5 different items:

  1. Stakeholders (e.g., Financial Product Owner)
  2. Primary business outcome (e.g., Decrease the total time of the monthly invoice processing)
  3. Business Drivers (e.g., Improve the waiting time)
  4. KPI (e.g., 30% opportunity time per month reduce)
  5. Capability (e.g., Invoice sorting automation)

The KPI item provides help us later on during the cloud adoption to measure the adoption's success. KPI needs to be set from the beginning. Otherwise, the business value is hard to track.

At the end of the exercise, we will have the list of all business outcomes, together with the list of names of the main stakeholders, KPIs, and the main business drivers. 

A full list of business outcomes that can be used, specific for each industry can be checked on the CAF website - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-framework/strategy/business-outcomes/

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Windows Docker Containers can make WIN32 API calls, use COM and ASP.NET WebForms

After the last post , I received two interesting questions related to Docker and Windows. People were interested if we do Win32 API calls from a Docker container and if there is support for COM. WIN32 Support To test calls to WIN32 API, let’s try to populate SYSTEM_INFO class. [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] public struct SYSTEM_INFO { public uint dwOemId; public uint dwPageSize; public uint lpMinimumApplicationAddress; public uint lpMaximumApplicationAddress; public uint dwActiveProcessorMask; public uint dwNumberOfProcessors; public uint dwProcessorType; public uint dwAllocationGranularity; public uint dwProcessorLevel; public uint dwProcessorRevision; } ... [DllImport("kernel32")] static extern void GetSystemInfo(ref SYSTEM_INFO pSI); ... SYSTEM_INFO pSI = new SYSTEM_INFO(

Azure AD and AWS Cognito side-by-side

In the last few weeks, I was involved in multiple opportunities on Microsoft Azure and Amazon, where we had to analyse AWS Cognito, Azure AD and other solutions that are available on the market. I decided to consolidate in one post all features and differences that I identified for both of them that we should need to take into account. Take into account that Azure AD is an identity and access management services well integrated with Microsoft stack. In comparison, AWS Cognito is just a user sign-up, sign-in and access control and nothing more. The focus is not on the main features, is more on small things that can make a difference when you want to decide where we want to store and manage our users.  This information might be useful in the future when we need to decide where we want to keep and manage our users.  Feature Azure AD (B2C, B2C) AWS Cognito Access token lifetime Default 1h – the value is configurable 1h – cannot be modified

ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded

Today blog post will be started with the following error when running DB tests on the CI machine: threw exception: System.InvalidOperationException: The Entity Framework provider type 'System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer' registered in the application config file for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded. Make sure that the assembly-qualified name is used and that the assembly is available to the running application. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=260882 for more information. at System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.DependencyResolution.ProviderServicesFactory.GetInstance(String providerTypeName, String providerInvariantName) This error happened only on the Continuous Integration machine. On the devs machines, everything has fine. The classic problem – on my machine it’s working. The CI has the following configuration: TeamCity .NET 4.51 EF 6.0.2 VS2013 It see