Migrating applications from data centers to the Microsoft Azure platform is often a challenging task for many application teams, mostly due to a lack of cloud experience and Azure know-how. The central cloud team can’t always provide the needed support, creating a bottleneck when it comes to deploying the necessary Azure subscriptions and cloud resources. meshStack offers a solution, facilitating the creation of Azure resources through a fully automated self-service platform, complete with all necessary elements required for lift and shift scenarios.

The ‘Lift and Shift’ strategy makes up a significant portion of most organizations’ cloud transformation efforts, but teams often lack the requisite experience and know-how, while central IT resources are stretched thin.

With ambitious cloud adoption goals, most organizations have limited time and resources for the refactoring of existing applications. Therefore, to close down data center operations in a timely manner, the workload must be shifted to the cloud without major architectural changes. The application teams responsible often lack cloud experience, and while they have a range of cloud services at their disposal, the central team is often resource-constrained to provide the necessary support. In Microsoft Azure’s case, they often manage Azure subscriptions instead of resource groups, to facilitate lift and shift use cases.

We’ve derived the Cloud Foundation Maturity Model from our many interactions with organizations at different stages of their cloud journey. This model spotlights crucial capabilities your organization needs to develop for enabling application teams with cloud services and infrastructure. The beauty of it? It’s implementation-agnostic. Even though we at meshcloud designed the model and offer a Cloud Foundation Platform, the emphasis is on the capabilities rather than a particular way of implementing them.

In our model, we refer to capabilities as building blocks. We’re talking about a construction metaphor here. You assemble the right blocks to lay down a strong cloud foundation. To help you understand better, we’ve outlined each building block and its essential components.

But, we didn’t just stop at defining these blocks. We also point out their interconnections. Building blocks are grouped into functional pillars, like Tenant Management or IAM. Plus, they can have dependencies – meaning the development of one capability might hinge on another.

Showback and Chargeback are familiar terms from financial stewardship in the cloud. These principles foster cost transparency and source-based billing, which are utilized in the FinOps methodology throughout three phases: Inform, Optimize, and Operate. These are applied to maximize the pay-per-use model’s benefits of cloud resources, fostering transparency and accountability. In the same vein, the allocation of financial costs is comparable to that of environmental costs. This implies that creating transparency and genuine responsibility for application teams can be effectively translated from a financial to an environmental perspective. For instance, in the Inform phase, users achieve clarity about their current carbon emissions and their allocation, and they would learn about their sustainable options (concerning environmental impact), which are increasingly provided by the cloud service providers themselves. Through the Optimize phase, adjustments to the infrastructure with the goal of minimizing the CO2 footprint can be implemented and measured. Lastly, in the Operate phase, the focus is on fostering accountability of all people involved by investing in training and sharing knowledge on sustainable cloud practices.

Cloud Foundation Teams, also known as Cloud Centers of Excellence, are key for successful cloud implementation and operation within an organization. Their cross-functional nature allows them to tackle different areas of your cloud journey, including project management, identity and access management (IAM), security, and cost management.

These teams usually consist of key roles such as Enterprise Architects, Platform Engineers, and Security Officers. These cloud stakeholders are instrumental in implementing your organization’s cloud strategy, ensuring it aligns with the needs of various customers.

But how can you make sense of who is doing what? That’s where our Cloud Foundation Stakeholder Map comes in handy. This comprehensive resource helps you identify the specific responsibilities of each role, enabling you to accelerate cloud onboarding, project implementation, and operations. Additionally, it provides clear guidelines on how to coordinate intersecting areas like IAM, IT security, controlling requirements, and ITSM integrations that form the core of your Cloud Foundation.

Without a well-thought-out organizational structure in the cloud, businesses risk sacrificing efficiency, security, and digital sovereignty. It’s a topic we often touch on in our conversations with customers. Blindly following the recommendations of cloud service providers isn’t always the best approach. When you try to mirror your company’s hierarchical structure – departments, regions, business units – into the cloud, you can face serious downsides. Through our experience, we’ve seen how a flatter hierarchy can help unleash potential, which might be trapped under layers of complicated hierarchies.

Crafting an organizational structure in the cloud can be full of challenges. This is why we’ve put together this whitepaper. It’s your map, meant to help you steer clear of pitfalls and show you what an effective structure should look like.

As part of the Cloud Adoption Framework, Microsoft Azure offers guidance on crafting management group hierarchies that cater to diverse organizational requirements.

Drawing from our vast experience working with large-scale enterprises with intricate divisional structures, we propose an approach that aligns the management group hierarchy with the desired set of landing zones.

To minimize complexity and streamline audits of the ensuing cloud infrastructure, it is best to keep resource hierarchies as flat as possible. This approach fosters centralized governance, with only one self-service delegation unit (subscriptions), thus averting the introduction of intermediate “self-service” units like “department” management groups.

Cloud Foundation Teams aspiring to transition from resource groups to subscriptions, for facilitating self-service cloud tenant environments, can capitalize on Azure’s capability to transfer resource groups to a new subscription. This process can be automated for efficiency.

At its core, FinOps is a cultural practice.
It’s the most efficient way in the world for teams to manage their cloud costs, where everyone takes ownership of their cloud usage supported by a central best-practices group.

Cross-functional teams work together to enable faster delivery, while at the same time gaining more financial and operational control. To implement the FinOps culture and mindset it is necessary to let go of traditional structures: Identifying and signing off costs is no longer left to a siloed procurement team.

Instead a cross-functional team (we’ll get to that in detail) adopts the FinOps practices:
Pulling together technology, business, and finance to optimize management of cloud vendors, rates, and discounts. FinOps enables all operational teams to access spending and consumption data transparently and close to real-time.

The FinOps process is split into three stages: Inform, optimize and operate. With FinOps you run through these stages repeatedly. This allows organizations to adapt quickly to new requirements.