Cloud Adoption, AWS CAF & Migration

Cloud adoption is an organizational change

Moving to AWS is not only a technology project. AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) is designed to help organizations identify and prioritize transformation opportunities, assess cloud readiness, and evolve the capabilities needed for cloud transformation. It connects business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations rather than treating migration as a server-copy exercise.

That broader view matters because a technically successful migration can still underperform if teams lack new operating processes, ownership is unclear, governance blocks delivery, or security controls are bolted on too late. CAF gives organizations a shared structure for discussing those dependencies before and during the cloud journey.

The six AWS CAF perspectives

AWS organizes CAF capabilities into six perspectives. Business helps ensure cloud investments accelerate digital-transformation ambitions and business outcomes. People focuses on culture, organizational structure, skills, and change. Governance coordinates cloud initiatives while managing benefits and risks. Platform addresses building an enterprise-grade, scalable hybrid cloud platform and modernizing workloads.

Security focuses on confidentiality, integrity, availability, and the security capabilities needed for cloud transformation. Operations helps ensure cloud services are delivered at a level agreed with business stakeholders. The perspectives deliberately overlap: a cloud platform without governance, skills, security, or operating practices is not a complete adoption strategy.

• Business — connect cloud investment to measurable business outcomes.
• People — develop skills, culture, organization, and change readiness.
• Governance — coordinate initiatives while managing value and risk.
• Platform — build the technical foundation and modernize workloads.
• Security — protect information, systems, and cloud capabilities.
• Operations — run cloud services to agreed business expectations.

The transformation journey

AWS CAF describes cloud transformation as an iterative journey with four phases: Envision, Align, Launch, and Scale. Envision connects cloud possibilities to strategic business outcomes. Align identifies capability gaps and dependencies and develops an action plan. Launch delivers pilots and production initiatives while demonstrating incremental value. Scale expands successful patterns and value across the organization.

The phases are intended to be iterative rather than a one-way waterfall. Different parts of an organization can move through them at different speeds, and experience from launched workloads can reveal new alignment work. This makes CAF useful as a transformation loop rather than simply a pre-migration checklist.

The seven migration strategies

For workload-level migration planning, AWS Prescriptive Guidance describes seven common strategies, often called the 7 Rs: retire, retain, rehost, relocate, repurchase, replatform, and refactor or re-architect. The strategy should follow business and technical requirements rather than a preference for one migration style.

Retire removes applications that are no longer needed. Retain keeps a workload in its current environment for now. Rehost moves it with minimal architectural change; relocate moves workloads between compatible infrastructure environments with little application change. Repurchase replaces the existing application with another product, often SaaS. Replatform makes targeted optimizations without fully redesigning the core architecture. Refactor or re-architect changes the application more substantially to gain capabilities such as cloud-native scalability, agility, or managed-service benefits.