Understanding AWS Cloud Foundations: Best Practices for Successful Cloud Adoption

Cloud Foundations gives guidelines that help customers deploy, configure, and secure new workloads and ensure they are prepared for ongoing operations in the cloud. Cloud Foundations helps customers deal with the choices that they are required to make via created AWS Services, AWS Solutions, Partner Solutions, and Guidance. These solutions will assist with your cloud foundation journey, and quicker the deployment of a production-ready environment.

Cloud Foundations Capabilities and Categories

AWS advises that you have a basic set of skills that allow you to deploy, manage, and govern your workloads to facilitate cloud adoption. A capability is all the information needed to set up and run a particular area of a cloud environment, including definitions, scenarios, instructions, and supporting solutions. The purpose of capabilities is to work with your entire technology setup.

AWS has defined 29 capabilities across six categories, which are shown in the image below to assist you in building a cloud foundation.

29 capabilities across six categories

1. Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance capabilities include:

Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC) assists businesses in establishing a basis for achieving security and compliance requirements and clarifying the overall policies your cloud environment must conform to. The capabilities in that domain assist you in defining what is required, determining the risk appetite and informing alignment of internal guidelines

• Audit & Assessment helps the gathering and organization of documentary evidence for internal or independent assessment of your cloud environment, validating compliance to policy claims, while Change Management allows for the deployment of planned alterations to configurable items within defined scopes like production and test, with approved changes implemented to minimize and accept risks to existing IT infrastructure.
• Forensics includes analyzing log information and evidentially captured images of possibly compromised resources to determine if an incident occurred and its nature, with outcomes of root cause analysis utilized for the implementation of preventative measures.
• Records Management helps the storage, retention, and secure handling of data by internal policies and regulatory requirements, encompassing various types of information such as financial records, transactional data, audit logs, business records, and personally identifiable information (PII).
• Service Onboarding includes the review and approval of AWS services for use, considering internal, compliance, and regulatory requirements, which involves risk assessment, documentation, implementation patterns, and communication of changes in the use of services.
• Tagging enables the grouping of cloud resources through metadata assignment for purposes including access control, cost reporting, automation, and creating resource constructs for visibility or control, which offers visibility and control.
• Governance allows you to establish and enforce business and regulatory policies within your cloud environment, which cover rules and risk definitions, with some policies integrated into other capabilities to ensure compliance with requirements.
• Log storage allows the centralized and secure collection of environment logs, enabling evaluation, monitoring, alerting, and auditing of access and actions on cloud resources and objects.

2. Operations

Enable your developers and operations teams to innovate faster, while ensuring the quality of application and infrastructure updates. The capabilities within this area enable you to build, deploy, and operate, workloads with ease in the cloud with developer experience and tools capabilities.

Operations capabilities include:

• Observability enables the collection and analysis of operational data regarding system and application activities, including identifying anomalies, indicators of compromise, performance metrics, and configuration changes, while Image Management facilitates the comprehensive lifecycle management of compute images, encompassing creation, acquisition, distribution, and storage tasks.
• Developer Experience and Tools enable us to provide the tools and processes required for developers to build and deploy workloads. This capability includes managing code, building workflows, and promoting workloads in production environments
• The capabilities within this area enable developers and operations teams to innovate quickly, while ensuring the quality of application and infrastructure updates, enabling the building, deploying, and operating of workloads in the cloud with improved developer experience and tools capabilities.
• Patch Management involves deploying sets of changes to update, fix, and improve the operation and security of infrastructure and workloads, addressing security vulnerabilities, bug fixes, and related tasks across operating systems, applications, and relevant software systems.

3. Security

The capabilities within this category set a secure, high-performing, and resilient foundation for your cloud environment by designing and implementing security policies and controls across various stack levels, protecting resources against external and internal vulnerabilities and threats while ensuring confidentiality, availability, integrity, and usability, as well as providing prioritized guidance for remediation.

• Security Incident Response facilitates effective responses to incidents by characterizing their nature and making changes.
• Identity Management & Access Control helped in setting up and monitoring permissions within your environment, organizing resource access into isolated groups based on the principle of least privilege (PoLP) to help develop a framework for environment management and service access.
• Application Security protects software applications and identifies unusual activity during customer interactions, minimizing risks like privilege escalation and unauthorized access.
• Encryption and Key Management execute a key management strategy that includes data encryption, least privileged key access, anomaly reporting, and key rotation.
• Secrets Management manages the storage, access control, logging, revocation, and rotation of various secrets like passwords and API keys.
• Data Isolation limits access to data at rest and in transit to authorized entities and includes detecting misuse, unauthorized access, leaks, and data theft.
• collecting evidence, and Vulnerability & Threat Management identifies and assesses vulnerabilities and threats, enabling their remediation while considering impact and scope.

4. Business Continuity

Business Continuity covers strategies such as Disaster Recovery, Backups, and Support to maintain operations during inefficiencies or crises, ensuring resilience and minimizing downtime for users during outages or unexpected events.

Business Continuity capabilities include:

• Backups involve creating reliable copies of data, including orchestration framework data, application data, logs, and customer data, to meet business and security goals, RPO, and RTO.
• Support allows troubleshooting in the cloud environment, including ticket submission, integration with existing ticketing systems, and timely issue escalation based on criticality and support level.
• Disaster Recovery involves planning and responding to disaster scenarios through actions like data backup/replication, failing over, testing, and plan execution to ensure system continuity and minimize business impact.

5. Finance category

The capabilities within this topic improve to transition and optimize existing finance processes for cloud readiness, ensuring cost transparency, control, planning, and optimization, while also managing records, resource inventory, and meeting compliance and regulatory requirements.

• Cloud Financial Management allows for the tracking, notification, and application of cost optimization techniques across cloud services, with centrally managed expense information and targeted visibility provided to critical stakeholders, while Resource Inventory Management facilitates the collection, visibility, tracking, configuration validation, and service mapping of cloud resources.

6. Infrastructure Category

The capabilities within this topic improve the design, construction, and management of secure and highly available cloud infrastructure, including practices like Network Security to implement security policies across networking stack levels, and Workload Isolation to separate environments hosting migrated or cloud-native workloads, ensuring both security and reliability whether migrating from on-premises or building natively in the cloud.

Conclusion:

The Cloud Foundations framework offers organizations a structured way to overcome the challenges of cloud adoption. By using the capabilities and categories provided in the framework, businesses can effectively deploy, manage, and govern their workloads in the cloud, ensuring security, compliance, resilience, and cost optimization. Implementing the recommendations and best practices defined in the Cloud Foundations framework can help organizations build a robust cloud foundation and accelerate their cloud journey with assurance and efficiency.