Customer narrative
Earlier Microsoft Learn modules for the Cloud Adoption Framework establish the narrative of Tailwind Traders. The company's central operations and infrastructure teams have successfully migrated some workloads to the cloud, but they face unanswered questions and unexpected concerns as they prepare for production release.
Tailwind Traders' balancing act
Tailwind Traders, like most businesses, must attempt to balance two competing business drivers: digital transformation and risk mitigation.
The Getting started with Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure module describes a few objectives that Tailwind Traders included in its cloud adoption plan. Most relevant to this module is its effort to migrate out of two leased datacenters in the next 24 months and use the cloud as a replacement datacenter.
The datacenters host a large portfolio of production workloads that support in-store and e-commerce operations. One of the datacenters also hosts dev/test environments. The other datacenter hosts preproduction innovations from the retail innovation team.
Tailwind's effort drives digital transformation and pushes the boundaries of what the business can do in the cloud. It has migrated low-risk workloads to the cloud. Tailwind has also begun to use cloud-native technologies to innovate and create new solutions that they couldn't implement on-premises. The value of the cloud is proving out. As Tailwind's adoption plans progress, the need for balance becomes more apparent.
Governance needs
To balance digital transformation efforts, Tailwind Traders needs a cloud governance team that can find a way to meet the following basic governance needs:
Maintain compliance.
Create better cost visibility and control.
Apply a security posture consistently.
Remain agile to support scale and transformation.
Before Tailwind Traders adopted the cloud, governance was delivered in a series of manual processes of review, acceptance, and change control. The employees, processes, and tools that delivered governance functions in the on-premises environment aren't scaling to consistently govern cloud deployments.