AWS Public Sector Blog
Operationalizing cloud adoption with the AWS Cloud Maturity Assessment
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Maturity Assessment (CMA) uses the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) to assess the maturity of your cloud adoption, and provide prescriptive guidance on prioritized next steps. By replacing guesswork with data-driven analysis, you will get a blueprint to prioritize, build, and mature your cloud capabilities. The AWS CAF is a set of best practices, tools, and guidance that helps organizations get started with cloud technologies (illustrated in Figure 1).
The AWS CMA uses a series of stakeholder interviews based on the AWS CAF to identify “leading indicators” inside your organization to measure progress, validate activity impacts, drive cloud adoption, and identify risks. The CMA is a no-cost assessment available through your AWS account team and is capable of providing a cloud service provider agnostic view of your enterprise.
Figure 1. Diagram of the cloud transformation journey.
What is the Cloud Maturity Assessment, and why do organizations use it?
According to AWS enterprise strategist Matthias Patzak, “In intuition-driven cultures, different people follow their unprovable hunches. Opinions collide, and in the end, the winner is the one who can tell the best, most fantastic story—or the one who is the highest paid. Data-driven organizations typically make decisions faster, with less debate and a higher probability of success.”
When prioritizing cloud transformation initiatives, even the most data-driven organizations are prone to revert to intuition in the absence of an objective measurement framework. This is especially problematic in public sector organizations as they work to balance finite resources against a growing demand for mission impact. Careful analysis of the factors that drive value realization can accelerate the time-to-value of technology initiatives and uncover gaps in knowledge or implementation.
The AWS CMA consists of 77 questions that measure capabilities across six perspectives (business, people, governance, platform, operations, and security). Stakeholders with direct knowledge of the capability subject matter engage in constructive discussions with AWS facilitators, arrive at a rating (Figure 2), and capture progress toward the next level. For each question, the CMA provides participants with tangible examples of each maturity level.
Figure 2. Scoring rubric showing potential cloud maturity assessment ratings 1 through 5.
After the AWS CMA, the assessment team provides a findings report with recommendations prioritized using the collected data. Each recommendation is accompanied by AWS prescriptive guidance. Your leadership team then prioritizes against business objectives and identifies target outcomes, next steps, and timelines for implementation. Point-in-time scores are captured in the form of snapshots and combined to show progress over time. The standardized approach enabled by the AWS CMA allows for comparison across business units and benchmarking across industries.
Ready to see where your team stands?
The AWS CMA provides a data-driven mechanism to operationalize the AWS CAF in a sequence aligned to your business objectives. AWS provides this no-cost, cloud agnostic service to customers in order to accelerate the transformational change inherent in cloud adoption. The insights uncovered by the CMA provide the data business leaders need to prioritize resources in line with service expectations. Reach out to your AWS account team or contact us to get started.