>> Hey friends. One of the key blockers for
some Cloud journeys is a lack of governance.
The Cloud Adoption Framework provides
a multi-discipline governance methodology with
best practices that your team can adopt to unblock your journey.
Brian Blanchard is here to show me how this
works today on Azure Friday.
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>> Hey friends. I'm Scott Hanselman and
it's another episode of Azure Friday.
I'm here with Brian Blanchard.
He's going to explain the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework
for me. How're you sir?
>> I'm doing wonderful Scott. How're you doing sir?
>> I'm living the dream.
Living the dream and learning about the Cloud.
We had a person on the show before
talking about the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework before,
but it was a little bit of a light overview
and we're going to dig a little bit deeper today, right?
>> Yes sir. That's the plan.
>> I understand that customers have said that a lack of
governance blocks them from accelerating to the Cloud,
but I think that there might be people who are watching
the show who frankly don't even know what governance means.
Let's just assume that I have no idea what that means.
That word sounds big and important and scary though.
>> It does, and it can be scary.
Actually, the Cloud Adoption Framework is all
about solving blockers and addressing the unknown.
Governance in particular, at the end of the day,
it's matter of dealing with fear,
uncertainty, and doubt that slows down consumption.
In my past life before joining Microsoft,
I served in different sea level
on executive roles for IT companies,
I had the same fears, the same uncertainties.
Are my people skilled enough?
Do we have the right processes in place?
Are we protected so that we can
go forward and do the stuff with confidence?
That's really what governance means.
It's not trying to throw everything in
the Cloud and make sure it looks like your data center,
but making sure that you address those tangible risks
that are creating true bonafide fears that you need to address.
>> Is governance primarily about risk mitigation,
or is it really just about knowing what we're
doing before we jump into the Cloud?
>> It's a combination of both.
We were going to do an intro to the Cloud Adoption Framework,
but we can skip ahead and look at
just governance itself and go through
the methodology. Does that helps a little?
>> Sure. Let's just do that briefly
because that would be a useful thing.
>> That sounds great. If we
think about your end state, where you want to be,
and what you need to have in place to really have that confidence,
we look at it in two parts.
First, there's understanding corporate policy itself.
So really looking closely at what are
the legitimate tangible business risks and then making
sure you've got corporate policy or
corporate compliance requirements in
place so you understand how you'd have to respond to those.
Then putting it on the right processes so that
your people know how to watch for violations,
address those violations and keep you safe.
That's the corporate side.
But behind that we have
disciplines of governance that Azure can help with.
Say tools that help with cost management,
so upon your fears of over spending, you know how to control that.
Or establishing a security baseline so that you can make sure that
your security requirements are consistently applied
across all different Cloud options you have.
Or making sure your resources are just
consistent in how they're configured,
how they recover, how they're on-board in management,
and making sure that your people
can get to the stuff in the Cloud,
and that identity is consistently applied and easily enforced.
Then as you're going through all that, making sure you're using
tools like Azure Policy and Azure Blueprints to
really accelerate how you deploy
both your governance requirements,
but also good, solid best
practices you're pushing out to the Cloud.
For us, governance is a couple of things that help deal with
those different risks that you truly could
be facing in any IT endeavor,
and addressing those fears and certainties now,
so the customers can go forward with
confidence based on the good and disciplines.
>> Those five disciplines of
Cloud governance really make sense to me.
That helps me a lot there.
Realizing that every company
is different and that one might really feel like
cost management is the number 1 thing that
a jump into the Cloud would concern them about,
while another one might say, well,
our deployments really need to be formalized in
the way that we manage our resources and configure them.
That's the thing. Someone's going to take
those five disciplines and they're going to sort them,
importance to least important in different ways,
everyone's going to be different,
and it sounds like a model for that that allows you
to constrain the things you want to
constrain and enable the things you want to enable.
>> Absolutely. We have guidance and
tools inside of Azure to help with each of those,
but before the customer gets
started to help them prioritize those,
we put an assessment out there.
That's really one of the first steps we suggest the customer use.
I want us to jump in the assessment here,
but the Cloud Adoption Framework Governance benchmark
allows the customer to come in
and put in some basic and book criteria and
help clearly see what
those requirements are and what's most important.
I'm just going through important and basic stuff here
just to get a spill then once
we're talking about an IT and software company.
If I want to look closely at one or
two of those different criteria, I can,
if I want to really evaluate where we are in all of them,
I could do that as well.
For the sake of this demo, let's focus on cost,
because that's a really common one.
If I just get started on costs,
it's going to ask a couple of questions here.
Click through that little note there and it's going to ask,
what's most important to us?
What are we trying to accomplish?
What are our primary strategies?
I'm not going to read all of the questions
for the sake of the audience's time,
but if they skim through
these different questions and just fill in what's important,
what's critical, what's very important,
it'll start to build out a profile that's specific to them.
It'll help them look at things like how do we
look at IT and budget allocation?
Is on-prem the most important thing or are we in a state
where experimentation is super important
and we're trying to change layers to work?
You really ask some penetrating questions like that.
Again, I'm just clicking some random things here
just to fill in a basic profile.
But when a customer is done with this,
it helps them look at those different criteria and say,
"Where are my priorities,
where am I at today, and
what's the rest of my industry look like?".
The way I fill these out,
it looks like in costs,
this particular customer is really well ahead of the curve.
If this is something that maybe they were little behind on,
it would show an inverse over there and show that
their priorities outweigh their current state.
Maybe that's a good place to develop more.
From there it gives them
real direct guidance on how can I learn more and do
more based on that particular discipline
that I really want to build on.
It makes it easier for the customer to hone in on what are
the disciplines that I need to be
successful at building my level of confidence?
>> That is interesting. This isn't
just a survey that you fill out,
this is an engine that then
gives you recommendations and then enters you
into the framework of
the Cloud Adoption Framework governance model
at the best entry point for you and
then on-board you into the Cloud the way
that you want to be on-boarded with the things that you value.
>> Yes, sir. Where actually it's
just multiple people on the side of
the customer environment take that survey
so that they can go in and get the perspective that's relevant to
their role so that they can
participate in governance in the right way.
>> Interesting. That makes a lot of sense.
This is something that is created by
the Azure team or a specific team within Azure,
who owns this at Microsoft?
>> Once you're inside of the [inaudible] team,
it's the team that brings you docs at
Microsoft and learn and all those pieces.
But it's a relatively small team there.
There's actually over 2,000
people that have helped contribute to those,
people in the Cloud solution architect roles,
other people in the field that touch customers,
our services team,
even partners and customers that come back and say,
"Well, this worked and this didn't."
It's a constant evolving framework that we keep as
a living documents to
help people get through some tough challenges.
>> That's really interesting. This has been validated and
this isn't just some sales tool,
this is really a governance framework
by people who know what they're talking about,
who then be validated by customers,
who then cycle that feedback back into
the team to make sure that it works for every industry?
>> Yes, sir. As we learn more about those different challenges,
new challenges evolve with market,
we work with the product groups to figure out
what are the best ways to solve those problems.
It's actually the next piece of what we love to
show off here with some of the governance guides.
[inaudible] as I go through
all those disciplines the different teams can use.
We have one for standard governance guide,
for less simplistic situation,
and some that are for more complex scenarios.
They walk through everything from how to organize
resources to how to set up your management group,
setting up different identity policy definitions and RBAC,
and giving a real pointing guidance on that,
even going into the network configuration connectivity.
As the customer progresses through,
it actually follows a narrative for
a customer that talks about what they're experiencing.
It's something's that's relatable and helps establish a set
of internal corporate policies
before you can get to the Cloud stuff.
What are those risks? What are we trying to do?
What risk can we tolerate?
What risk can't we tolerate?
How do we set up good policy statements
that are designed for the Cloud?
Then based on those, it gives the customer
extremely prescriptive guidance on
what to go implement and how to set it
up with a base foundation that
setup that we referred to as an MVP or governance foundation.
Then deeper areas of
implementation around each of the disciplines.
If you want to advance your identity baseline
or you want to get more effective at cost,
there's real specific guidance to each piece of those.
Then from a doing perspective,
all of this can be implemented through Azure Blueprints.
If you go in Azure Blueprints,
there's a whole array of different things you can deploy.
One of those is the CAF Foundation blueprint.
The customers can push out to give them
an instantaneous governance foundation
that they can use inside of this guide.
>> That's interesting. Then this is going not just from, "Hey,
it's some pros and here are
some Word documents that you can go and read,
" but that turns into something with
actual teeth that would change the structure of how you
decide to put things into Azure so that you've
codified your governance model?
>> Yes, sir. Throughout everything,
we try to share insiders of the Cloud Adoption Framework,
we try to match with actionable pieces like that that live
inside of the portal or
inside the GitHub and other source code repos.
>> When someone is introducing governance into
their adoption process that they're doing into the Cloud,
everyone's at different levels
like you might have a department that's
already gone into the Cloud without asking anyone.
You might have different people
at different points in their journey.
Do you have to be at a certain level in
your journey to go and introduce this model?
>> No. Actually, the Cloud Adoption Framework
is meant to span the customer's entire Cloud Adoption journey.
We have guidance and a methodology for strategy,
early stage stuff,
some planning guidance and
a methodology there that uses Azure DevOps.
Ready, focuses on how do you build out
the environment for these early stage pieces of work.
Even with guidance into migration and innovation.
Throughout that you'll see these things said in
governance principles play out
in different ways based on where you're at.
Same with the operations management pieces.
Sharing how we suggest the customers operate
their Cloud once they get past all of these different experiences.
>> This is pretty powerful stuff and this is
a living and breathing document that is being updated.
It's part of the documentation.
Where can we learn more about this
and how can people get started right away?
>> There's some links down below in the show notes
here that will take you straight
onto the Cloud Adoption Framework.
You can get to it through a number of different links.
The easiest one to remember is just going to
aka.ms/adopt and that'll take you right
into our Azure.com web page about the Cloud Adoption Framework,
where you can read a lot more
and go deeper into the content from there.
>> Fantastic. It looks like there is also
partners that understand this framework as well,
so you can be set up for success?
>> There are. In each
each methodology of the Cloud Adoption Framework,
there are partners that have come forward and
identified offers that they're extremely good at.
You go into those and click on the "Governance tab",
you can see a whole host of partners that specifically target
governance specific engagements with
customers to help them get through these processes.
>> Fantastic.
Well, I appreciate you demystifying governance for me.
I'm learning all about
the Cloud Adoption Framework here on Azure Friday.
Hey, thanks for watching this episode of Azure Friday.
Now I need you to like it, comment on it,
tell your friends, retweet it,
watch more Azure Friday.
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