Cloud Adoption Framework Overview

The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) is a collection of documentation, best practices, and tools designed to guide organisations through their cloud adoption journey. It provides proven guidance for every stage of cloud adoption — from defining the business strategy through to ongoing management of cloud workloads. The CAF is vendor-informed but vendor-agnostic in principle; Microsoft provides it free of charge.

The CAF is structured around six stages that represent the phases of a cloud adoption journey:

1. Strategy — define motivations and expected business outcomes
2. Plan — align cloud adoption to business priorities
3. Ready — prepare the environment (landing zones)
4. Adopt — migrate and innovate workloads
5. Govern — manage risk and ensure compliance
6. Manage — operate and optimise the cloud environment

The Strategy stage helps organisations articulate why they are moving to the cloud. Common motivations include: cost savings, application modernisation, enabling global reach, responding to a data centre contract expiry, or improving disaster recovery. The strategy stage produces a Cloud Strategy document that aligns IT goals with business goals and gains executive sponsorship for the adoption journey.

The Plan stage translates the strategy into an actionable adoption plan. Key activities include: creating a digital estate inventory (cataloguing all applications and servers to migrate), rationalising the portfolio (applying the 6-Rs to decide how each app will be handled), building a cloud adoption plan (project timeline and resource requirements), and aligning the plan with business release cycles to minimise disruption.

The Ready stage prepares the Azure environment to receive workloads. The primary deliverable is a landing zone — a configured Azure environment that has the networking, identity, security, and governance foundations in place. The Ready stage ensures that when the first workload is migrated, it lands in an environment that already meets the organisation's standards, rather than being bolted on later.

The Adopt stage has two tracks that run in parallel:

• Migrate — move existing workloads to Azure, typically starting with lower-risk applications (the 'migrate' wave)
• Innovate — build new cloud-native applications that take advantage of PaaS, AI, and serverless capabilities

The CAF recommends starting with the migrate track to build team skills and generate quick wins that demonstrate cloud value to stakeholders.

The Govern stage implements the guardrails that prevent cloud environments from drifting into a state of compliance risk or uncontrolled cost. It uses Azure Policy, management groups, resource tagging, and cost alerts to enforce governance across all subscriptions. The CAF's Govern methodology emphasises building governance incrementally — starting with the minimum viable governance stance and adding controls as the organisation matures.

The Manage stage focuses on ongoing operational management of the cloud environment. It covers defining a management baseline (monitoring, backup, disaster recovery for all workloads), establishing an operations team with clear responsibilities, and continuously improving operational capabilities. The CAF's Manage methodology recommends using Azure Monitor, Azure Automation, and Azure Arc as the core operational tools.

The CAF and the Well-Architected Framework are complementary but address different concerns. The CAF provides guidance on the journey of adopting Azure — strategy, planning, landing zones, migration, governance. The WAF provides guidance on the quality of individual workloads — how to design each application for reliability, security, cost, operational excellence, and performance. Organisations use both together for a complete cloud programme.

The CAF is designed to be scalable — large enterprises use all six stages in depth, while small organisations can adopt a lighter approach. The start small and expand guidance helps smaller teams begin with a minimal landing zone, migrate a few workloads, and grow their governance maturity over time. The CAF documentation provides specific guidance for SME adoption scenarios distinct from large enterprise migrations.

Microsoft provides several tools and accelerators to speed up CAF adoption:

• CAF Landing Zone accelerator — Bicep/Terraform templates for deploying an enterprise landing zone
• Azure Migrate — discovery and migration tooling for the Adopt stage
• Azure DevOps CAF template — pre-populated backlog for the cloud adoption plan
• Microsoft Assessment tools — readiness assessments for the Strategy and Plan stages

Test your understanding of Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) concepts from this lesson.

In this lesson you learned: the Cloud Adoption Framework guides organisations through Strategy, Plan, Ready, Adopt, Govern, and Manage stages; the Ready stage focuses on establishing landing zones as the foundation; and the CAF and WAF are complementary — CAF covers the adoption journey while WAF covers workload quality. Next up we explore Azure Landing Zones in depth.