>> 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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