Get started: Understand and document foundational alignment decisions
The cloud adoption journey can unlock many business, technical, and organizational benefits. Whatever you want to accomplish, if your journey involves the cloud, there are a few initial decisions that every team involved should understand.
Note
Selecting any of the following links might lead you to bounce around the table of contents for the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure, looking for fundamental concepts that you'll use later to help the team implement the associated guidance. Bookmark this page to come back to this checklist often.
Before you begin
As you work through this guide, record our foundational decisions using the initial decision template. The template can help you quickly onboard team members who participate in the cloud adoption lifecycle by clarifying how your cloud environment is configured and why.
If you already have an environment running in Azure, the Azure governance visualizer can help you accelerate your documentation. Gain insight into policies, Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC), Azure Blueprints, subscriptions, and more. From the collected data the tool provides visibility on your hierarchy map, creates a tenant summary, and builds granular scope insights about management groups and subscriptions.
Step 1: Understand how Azure works
If you've chosen Azure as a cloud provider to support your cloud adoption journey, it's important to understand how Azure works.
Involved teams, deliverables, and supporting guidance:
Everyone involved in the cloud adoption lifecycle should have a basic understanding of how Azure works.
Step 2: Understand initial Azure concepts
Azure is built on a set of foundational concepts that are required for a deep conversation about the technical strategy for Azure implementations.
Involved teams, deliverables, and supporting guidance:
Everyone involved in Azure implementation of the technology strategy should understand the terms and definitions in the foundational concepts.
Step 3: Review the portfolio
Whatever cloud provider you choose, all cloud hosting and environmental decisions start with an understanding of the portfolio of workloads. The Cloud Adoption Framework includes a few tools for understanding and evaluating the portfolio.
Deliverables:
- Record the location, status, and accountable person for the portfolio documentation in the initial decision template.
Guidance to support deliverable completion:
- Fundamental concepts help you understand key Azure topics before you begin your cloud adoption.
- The operations management workbook and business alignment approach help you understand the workloads and assets that have been transitioned to a cloud operations team.
- The cloud adoption plan provides a backlog of the workloads and assets that are slated for adoption in the cloud.
- Digital estate analysis is an approach to documenting existing workloads and assets that are slated for adoption in the cloud. In Azure, the digital estate is best represented in a tool called Azure Migrate.
| Accountable team | Responsible and supporting teams |
|---|---|
Step 4: Define portfolio-hierarchy depth to align the portfolio
Hosting assets and workloads in the cloud can be simple, consisting of a single workload and its supporting assets. For other customers, the cloud adoption strategy might include thousands of workloads and many more supporting assets. The portfolio hierarchy gives common names for each level to help create a common language for organization, regardless of the cloud provider.
Deliverables:
- Record the relevant hierarchy needs in the initial decision template.
Guidance to support deliverable completion:
- Understand the levels of the portfolio hierarchy to align fundamental terms.
| Accountable team | Responsible and supporting teams |
|---|---|
Step 5: Establish a naming and tagging standard across the portfolio
All existing workloads and assets should be properly named and tagged in accordance with a naming and tagging standard. Those standards should be documented and available as a reference for all team members. When possible, the standards should also be automatically enforced to ensure minimum tagging requirements.
Deliverables:
- Record the location, status, and accountable party for the naming and tagging conventions workbook in the initial decision template.
Guidance to support deliverable completion:
- Create a naming and tagging standard.
- Populate the naming and tagging conventions tracking template to track decisions.
- Review and update existing tags in Azure.
- Enforce tagging policies in Azure.
| Accountable team | Responsible and supporting teams |
|---|---|
Step 6: Create a resource organization design to implement the portfolio hierarchy
To ensure consistent alignment with the portfolio hierarchy decisions, it's important to create a design for resource organization. Such a design aligns organizational tools from the cloud provider with the portfolio hierarchy required to support your cloud adoption plan. This design will guide implementation by clarifying which assets can be deployed into specific boundaries within the cloud environments.
Deliverables:
- Map Azure products to the aligned level of the portfolio hierarchy in the initial decision template.
Guidance to support deliverable completion:
- Understand how Azure products support the portfolio hierarchy.
- Review existing subscriptions for alignment to the chosen portfolio hierarchy.
Build a subscription strategy:
- Start with Two subscriptions by design. Add basic subscription designs to account for common enterprise needs, like shared services or sandbox subscriptions.
- Manage multiple subscriptions as additional subscriptions are required to support the cloud adoption plan.
- Establish clear boundaries based on the portfolio hierarchy.
- When required, move resource groups and assets between subscriptions to adhere to the organization strategy.
| Accountable team | Responsible and supporting teams |
|---|---|
Step 7: Map capabilities, teams, and RACI to fundamental concepts
Complexity of the portfolio hierarchy will help inform organizational structures and methodologies to guide the day-to-day activities of various teams.
Deliverables:
- Complete the getting started guides for organizational alignment based on these concepts.
Guidance to support deliverable completion:
- Use the prior steps as a guide to evaluate the portfolio hierarchy accountability guidance. Determine which capabilities might need to be delivered by dedicated organizations or virtual teams.
- Use Get started: Align your organization to apply the portfolio hierarchy accountability guidance to the RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed) diagram.
| Accountable team | Responsible and supporting teams |
|---|---|
What's next
Build on this set of fundamental concepts through the series of getting started guides in this section of the Cloud Adoption Framework.