AWS Cloud Adoption Framework and Perspectives

AWS CAF groups capabilities into six perspectives:

1. Business
2. People
3. Governance
4. Platform
5. Security
6. Operations

Each perspective includes a set of capabilities that relevant stakeholders own or manage during the cloud transformation journey.

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework was developed in response to the increasing demand for digital transformation and the need to harness the potential of cloud computing. While the AWS CAF is tailored for AWS migration journeys, its practices are often integrated with cloud system partner technologies and adapted for other cloud platforms.

As companies face mounting pressure to modernize operations, cloud migration has become essential for enhancing agility, scalability and enabling cutting-edge technologies, such as process automation, real-time analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).

In a 2025 study from Synergy Research Group, enterprise spending on cloud services increased to USD 99 billion worldwide, an increase of over USD 20 billion from the second quarter of 2024. The study attributes this growth to the explosion of generative AI (gen AI) and the widespread demand for cloud infrastructure to support AI-driven workloads.¹

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) CAF helps a wide range of stakeholders (for example, CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CTOs, DevOps teams, cloud solutions architects) achieve the wanted technology and business outcomes. It offers many valuable benefits, including:

• Reduced business risk: Organizations can minimize overall risk through the AWS CAF framework, thus improving reliability, increasing performance and enhancing security.

• Improved environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance: The framework delivers insights for improving sustainability and corporate transparency, which can benefit overall ESG performance.

• Increased operational efficiency: By implementing the AWS CAF, organizations reduce operating costs, increase DevOps team productivity and improve both employee and customer experiences.

• Enhanced agility: The AWS CAF offers a structural approach for faster experimentation, innovation and new service deployment.

• Higher revenue growth: The framework provides revenue expansion opportunities through new products and services, expanded market reach and extended customer bases.

The AWS CAF provides tailored guidance to help organizations move workloads to the cloud in a secure, compliant and cost-effective manner. Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach, it uses a structured procedure that accelerates cloud-based transformation through capabilities and strategic phases.

The framework begins by mapping out 47 discrete capabilities across 6 key perspectives. These capabilities represent an enterprise's capacity for deploying resources (for example, people, technology, other assets) through processes that deliver specific outcomes.

The framework then identifies four critical transformation domains that are essential for running a successful cloud strategy before guiding organizations through four iterative cloud transformation phases that build on each other.

The AWS CAF perspectives are centered on foundational capabilities and provide prescriptive guidance used by thousands of businesses to improve cloud readiness and accelerate their cloud transformation.

The six AWS CAF perspectives are each covered in a separate white paper:

1. Business perspective
2. People perspective
3. Governance perspective
4. Platform perspective
5. Security perspective
6. Operations perspective

Cloud investments must align with strategy. The business perspective focuses on ensuring that these investments accelerate both digital transformation and business goals. It also focuses on value realization and financial optimization.

Foundational capabilities include:

• Strategy management
• Portfolio management
• Innovation management
• Product management
• Strategic partnership
• Data monetization
• Business insights
• Data science

Technology changes are only as effective as the people implementing them. The People perspective is designed to spur organizational change and bridge the gap between technology and business objectives. It accelerates the cloud journey to help organizations focus on a culture based on continuous growth and learning.

Foundational capabilities include:

• Culture evolution
• Transformational leadership
• Cloud fluency
• Workforce transformation
• Change acceleration
• Organization design
• Organizational alignment

Cloud initiatives require coordinated oversight. The Governance perspective establishes frameworks for managing cloud operations while optimizing value and controlling risks.

Foundational capabilities include:

• Program and project management
• Benefits management
• Risk management
• Cloud financial management
• Application portfolio management
• Data governance
• Data curation

Cloud infrastructure consists of hardware and software components that combine to deliver the scalability, flexibility and accessibility that modern businesses require. The Platform perspective aids in building an enterprise-level, scalable, hybrid cloud platform. It focuses on modernizing existing workloads and implementing new cloud-native solutions, such as AWS services (for example, Lambda) or third-party technologies.

Foundational capabilities include:

• Platform architecture
• Data architecture
• Platform engineering
• Data engineering
• Provisioning and orchestration
• Modern application development
• CI/CD pipelines

Ensuring that data is protected through every phase of a cloud migration strategy is a critical enabler for robust security. The Security perspective focuses on achieving confidentiality, integrity and availability surrounding data and cloud workloads.

Foundational capabilities include:

• Security governance
• Security assurance
• Access management
• Threat detection
• Vulnerability management
• Infrastructure protection
• Data protection
• Application security
• Incident response

Cloud environments require continuous monitoring and maintenance to achieve optimal performance. The Operations perspective establishes processes and practices for effective cloud management, ensuring they consistently deliver value and meet business requirements.

Foundational capabilities include:

• Observability
• Event management
• AIOps
• Incident and problem management
• Change management
• Release management
• Performance and capacity management
• Configuration management
• Patch management
• Availability and continuity management
• Application management

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework identifies four broad transformation domains that must change for successful cloud transformation.

Building on the foundational capabilities and transformation domains, AWS CAF outlines four incremental phases for cloud transformation:

1. Envision
2. Align
3. Launch
4. Scale

Organizations identify how cloud technology can accelerate business outcomes. This phase involves facilitated workshops that help teams assess transformation opportunities and establish the foundation for digital transformation initiatives.

Teams evaluate existing organizational capabilities against cloud transformation requirements. Through structured assessments, organizations identify capability gaps and develop action plans to address deficiencies across the foundational capabilities.

Organizations implement pilot initiatives in production environments while building solutions that demonstrate measurable business value. This phase focuses on validating cloud strategies through controlled, real-world deployments.

Proven pilot initiatives expand to their intended scope as organizations realize the anticipated business benefits of their cloud transformation. This phase marks the achievement of full-scale cloud adoption and the realization of strategic objectives.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides cloud architects with best practices and hands-on guidance for building secure, high-performing and cost-effective infrastructure across applications and workloads. It consists of specialized guidance, practical labs and the AWS Well-Architected Tool—a free resource within the AWS Management Console that enables workload assessments, identifies high-risk areas and tracks potential improvements.

The framework centers around six fundamental pillars:

1. Operational excellence
2. Security
3. Reliability
4. Performance efficiency
5. Cost optimization
6. Sustainability

The acceleration of AI integration across enterprise infrastructure continues to soar. A recent IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) study of 2,900 global executives found that AI-enabled workflows—many driven by agentic AI—are expected to expand from 3% in 2024 to 25% by 2026. 

Recognizing the transformative impact of AI and machine learning (ML) extends to cloud adoption strategies. AWS has published two guides to help organizations navigate AI-driven transformation:

• The AWS CAF for Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning and Generative AI
• The Getting Started Resource Center machine learning decision guide

Both of these help organizations apply CAF principles to AI use cases, ensuring that AI investments align with broader digital transformation goals and deliver measurable business value.