Free Cloud Adoption Framework Test

Many organizations are still early in their cloud journey: some already run workloads on AWS, while others are still deciding whether, when, and how to migrate. In both cases, it can be difficult to answer a simple question: How ready are we, really, to use cloud as a strategic lever rather than just another hosting option?

The Free Cloud Readiness Assessment is a structured online questionnaire based on the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF). It gives you a clear, shared picture of where you are today and what you should do next — whether you already run workloads on AWS or are still planning your first migrations

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework

This is a self-assessment based on the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework and modern cloud operating practices. It does not assume that you are already in the cloud: it works equally well if most of your estate is still on premises or in a data center and you are building your AWS business case.

It looks at how your strategy, organization, governance, platform, security, and operations capabilities support — or block — your journey to AWS and cloud adoption.

The outcome is a cloud readiness baseline that you can share with leadership and teams, plus a short set of recommendations that can feed directly into your AWS migration or modernization roadmap.

CAF Perspectives

The question set is organized into six perspectives. For each question, you receive a maturity score from 0 to 3. The goal is not to produce a perfect audit, but to build an approximate, shared understanding of how ready you are to operate effectively in AWS and the cloud.

1. Business

The Business perspective ensures that your cloud investments accelerate your digital transformation ambitions and business outcomes. It focuses on aligning cloud strategy to measurable business results — reducing risk, growing revenue, improving operational efficiency, and enabling continuous innovation.

This perspective surfaces questions such as:

• Strategy management  – Does your 3–5 year business plan (new markets, products, efficiency) explicitly consider cloud/AWS as a lever, or is it still mostly treated as a technical detail?

• Portfolio management  – Do you prioritize cloud and modernization initiatives like an investment portfolio (based on strategic value, efficiency, and delivery capacity), or simply react to short‑term requests?

• Innovation management  – Is cloud already seen as a toolbox to create new digital products and experiences, or mainly as “future datacenter 2.0” for moving existing servers?

• Product management  – Are you moving toward stable, cross‑functional teams owning digital products end‑to‑end, or still heavily organized by functional silos and projects?

• Strategic partnership with AWS  – Are you already talking with AWS and partners about co‑innovation and go‑to‑market, or just comparing price lists and infrastructure options?

• Data monetization  – Have you identified concrete data use cases (internal and external) linked to KPIs, or only a generic desire to “use data more” once you are in the cloud?

• Business insights  – Can leaders and teams get timely, self‑service insight today, or would a move to AWS mainly lift your current reporting problems into a new environment?

• Data science  – Are ML and advanced analytics already part of key processes, or still limited to isolated pilots and ideas that could be enabled by a future cloud platform?

2. People

The People perspective focuses on culture, leadership, workforce capability, and organizational design. Cloud transformation is above all a human transformation: without the right skills, behaviors, leadership, and organizational structures, technology alone will not deliver sustained value.

This perspective surfaces questions such as:

• Culture evolution  – Is there a plan, with concrete behaviours, to evolve culture toward experimentation, data‑driven decisions, and cross‑functional collaboration, or will these be blockers for a cloud migration?

• Transformational leadership  – Are leaders ready to sponsor and steer the cloud/digital transformation, or is it still perceived as “an IT project” to be delegated later?

• Cloud fluency   – Do key stakeholders understand cloud concepts and trade‑offs enough to make good decisions before and during migration?

• Workforce transformation  – Do you have a view of the roles and skills you will need for AWS (now and in 1–3 years), and a plan to build or acquire them?

• Change acceleration  – Do you apply a structured change framework to help people adopt new cloud‑enabled ways of working, or is change mostly reactive?

• Organization design & alignment  – Are you evolving toward cloud‑aligned structures (Cloud Centre of Excellence, platform teams, product teams) and a true partnership between business and IT?

3. Governance

The Governance perspective focuses on orchestrating cloud initiatives, managing risk, and ensuring that investments translate into measurable business outcomes. It provides the structure to govern programs, finances, data, and risk in a coordinated, value-driven manner.

This perspective surfaces questions such as:

• Program & project management  – Are you prepared to coordinate multiple, interdependent migration and modernization streams, or would they run as isolated projects?

• Benefits management  – Are expected business benefits of moving to AWS (risk reduction, cost, new revenue) clearly defined and measurable, or just assumptions in a slide deck?

• Risk management  – Do you have a structured way to assess and manage how cloud can reduce (and introduce) risks, integrated with your enterprise risk management?

• Cloud financial management  – Are ownership, visibility, and processes for planning and optimizing future cloud spend already in place, or will they be invented on the fly?

• Application portfolio management  – Do you have a reliable inventory and strategy (retire/retain/rehost/replatform/refactor) for your application estate to guide migration waves?

4. Platform

The Platform perspective focuses on building a secure, scalable, enterprise-grade cloud environment. It covers the full range from infrastructure architecture and engineering, through data platforms, to application development patterns and CI/CD practices.

This perspective surfaces questions such as:

• Platform architecture  – Are there already principles, patterns, and guardrails defined for your future AWS environment (identity, networking, logging, backups)?

• Data architecture  – Do you have a target vision for data and analytics architecture (lake, warehouse, streaming, ML) that cloud will support, or is this still implicit?

• Platform engineering  – Are you planning a multi‑account landing zone with integrated security, logging, networking and reusable building blocks, or mainly thinking in terms of “one AWS account per project”?

• Provisioning & orchestration  – Will teams get self‑service access to approved AWS “products” (templates, modules), or will provisioning remain ticket‑based and manual?

• Modern application development & CI/CD  – Are development and release practices ready to take advantage of cloud (automation, observability, frequent releases), or still tied to legacy ways of working?

• Data engineering  – Are you prepared to modernize data flows with pipelines and orchestration, or are critical processes still heavily manual?

5. Security

The Security perspective helps achieve the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data and cloud workloads. It covers nine capabilities that span governance, assurance, identity, infrastructure, data protection, application security, threat detection, vulnerability management, and incident response.

This perspective surfaces questions such as:

• Security governance & assurance  – Is there a clear model for cloud security responsibilities, policies, and continuous control monitoring, or will this be invented later under time pressure?

• Identity and access management  – Are you ready to manage identities and permissions at scale across AWS accounts (SSO, roles, SCPs, reviews)?

• Threat detection & vulnerability management  – Do you have processes and tools that can extend into AWS (logging, monitoring, detection, scanning), even if you are not using them there yet?

• Infrastructure & data protection  – Are standards for segmentation, hardening, encryption, and data protection defined so they can be applied from the first AWS workloads onward?

• Application security & incident response  – Are security tests integrated into your development process and do you have (or plan) a cloud‑aware incident response approach?

6. Operations

The Operations perspective ensures that cloud services are delivered at the level agreed upon with business stakeholders. It covers capabilities such as observability, event management, incident management, change and release management, performance and capacity management, configuration management, patch management, availability and continuity, and application management.

• Observability – Do you have comprehensive monitoring of your workloads, including logs, metrics, traces, and synthetic checks, with centralized dashboards and actionable alerts?

• Event management – Do you have a structured way to detect, classify, route, and prioritize operational events based on business criticality, rather than treating all alerts the same?

• Incident management – Do you have a practiced incident process with clear escalation paths, runbooks, on-call rotations, and blameless post-incident reviews?

• Change & release management – Do you use a formal, risk-aware change process with approval gates, rollback plans, and CI/CD integration that enables frequent but safe releases?

• Performance & capacity management – Do you proactively monitor, forecast, and manage workload performance and capacity against defined service objectives?

• Configuration management – Do you have visibility and control over resource configuration, drift, ownership, and compliance across your AWS environment?

• Patch management – Do you have a repeatable way to assess, schedule, apply, and verify patches across operating systems, middleware, and cloud workloads in line with risk and criticality?

• Availability & continuity management – Are critical workloads designed for high availability and disaster recovery, with defined RTO/RPO targets, automated backups, and tested failover procedures?

• Application management – Do you have a unified operational view of your application portfolio, with standardized runbooks, ownership, and lifecycle management for cloud workloads?

Official CAF documentation

For detailed guidance on the framework and implementation patterns:

• Overview of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework
• Whitepapers:
  • Business Perspective
  • People Perspective
  • Governance
  • Platform
  • Security
  • Operations

Next step

If the free CAF assessment confirmed areas where you need support, here's how to work with me:

• Book a free 45-minutes assessment session
  In a focused session, I review your current AWS setup or migration plan, identify quick improvements in cost, security, and reliability, and outline a high-level roadmap tailored to your business.
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• Contact me
  If you have questions, or if you prefer a call, send me a message .