Assessment Frameworks · Rapid vs. Deep Enterprise

In this module, you'll learn to:

• Choose between a rapid 4–6 week assessment and a deep 3–4 month one
• Name the six AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) perspectives a deep assessment covers
• Spot the signs that a rapid assessment won't be enough

Before you start: nothing beyond a general idea of how servers and applications run in a datacenter. This is the first module of the track.

Two ways to assess

Every migration starts with an assessment, but organizations arrive in very different situations. Most assessments follow one of two models:

1. Rapid assessment (4–6 weeks): driven by tools and data. It answers three questions quickly: what do we have, what will it cost on AWS, and what licensing problems are waiting for us?
2. Deep assessment (3–4 months): the same data, plus workshops across the whole organization. It also looks at people, skills, governance, and how the teams will run things in the cloud.

Picking the wrong one hurts either way. A three-month study when the datacenter lease ends in 90 days leaves no time to move. A four-week tool scan at a heavily regulated bank, without the security and operations teams on board, produces a plan that stalls in Mobilize.

Rapid vs. deep

The six CAF perspectives

In a deep assessment, the server inventory is only half the picture. Workshops cover the six perspectives of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework:

1. Business: what the migration is for: lower cost, faster delivery, new regions, or sustainability targets.
2. People: the skills teams have, the gaps, training, and readiness for new ways of working.
3. Governance: program management, cloud cost management (FinOps), and how success is measured.
4. Platform: current architecture, hybrid connectivity, CI/CD maturity, and the target landing zone.
5. Security: identity, encryption, compliance, vulnerability management, and incident response.
6. Operations: monitoring, backup and disaster recovery, the service desk, and on-call practices.

Which one to choose

Choose rapid when:

• The main need is a credible cost case, to win budget or MAP funding.
• The estate is mostly VMware, well named, with administrators who know it.
• A commercial deadline is close, such as a hypervisor licence renewal or a colocation contract ending.

Choose deep when:

• The estate includes many physical servers, mainframe links, or several different hypervisors.
• Compliance requires documented data flows and a formal security review before any cloud networking is approved.
• The way teams are organized has to change, for example from separate sysadmin teams to a platform team.

Key terms

• Rapid assessment: 4–6 weeks, driven by tools such as RVTools and a short collector run. It produces a business case and a first strategy per workload.
• Deep assessment: 3–4 months. It adds 30–90 days of usage data and workshops across the organization.
• AWS CAF: the Cloud Adoption Framework's six perspectives: business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations.
• MAP: the AWS Migration Acceleration Program, in three phases: assess, mobilize, and migrate and modernize.

Pop quiz

Five questions: three on the ideas in this module, and two scenarios where you apply them. The order changes every time you take it, and 4 out of 5 passes.