Test your maturity in the cloud here!

Continuous Cloud improvements are necessary. This assessment is build on a set of guiding tenets that can be used to improve the quality of your cloud workload.

Test yourself and find out where you are in the areas of security, cost, operational excellence, reliability, engineering, performance, and sustainability.

At the end of the self-assessment, you will get a hint on what you should do to have an updated cloud environment and an excellent architecture.

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1Security
2Cost
3Operational Excellence
4Reliability Engineering
5Performance
6Sustainability

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Step 1 out of 6

Security

1. To which degree have you identified your critical assets in the cloud in terms of security?*

No / Don’t know

We have done some work, but it is not complete.

Yes, we have identified some of our critical assets.

Yes, we have identified all critical assets and implemented fitting security measures.

Yes, we have identified and implemented tagging on both critical and non-critical assets.

2. To which degree would you say that you know where your sensitive data resides?*

No / Don’t know

We know where most of our sensitive data resides.

We know where all our sensitive data resides.

We know where all our sensitive data reside and have implemented fitting labelling and protection measures.

We know where all our sensitive data resides and have real time tracking of our data.

3. To which degree do you have control over where your data travels and how it is used and shared?*

No / Don’t know

We have some control, but not complete.

We have control of our data in transit.

We have control of our data in transit and sharing.

We have control of our data in transit, data at rest and data in use.

4. To which degree can you say that your identity management is setup for least privilege?*

No / Don’t know

Some manual processes for least privilege are in place.

We fully practise the least privilege in our cloud environment.

We have identified key roles and implemented a privilege hierarchy.

We have complete control over identity governance.

5. To which degree are you aware of the compliance requirements on your Cloud environment?*

No / Don’t know

We don’t have an audit plan in place.

We run internal desktop audits.

We have ad hoc audits.

We have regular external audits to hold our compliance certifications.

Next Step

Step 2 out of 6

Cost

1. To which degree would you say you're tracking costs in live dashboards, and have made the dashboards accessible to all involved parties?*

Not at all / Don’t know

We have a little visibility of our spending.

We use the portal, and we manually create reports.

We track all detailed usage and frequently update reports.

We have automated live reports and have implement monthly improvement cost optimisation cycles.

2. To which degree would you say that you forecast accurately with regards to future consumption?*

Not at all / Don’t know

We do yearly forecasts that we adjust once a year.

We do quarterly forecasts that we adjust quarterly.

We frequently forecast, and the forecasts are accurate.

We have rolling granular forecasts tracked against spend, budgets and savings.

3. To which degree would you say your company has benefited from cost improvements?*

Not at all / Don’t know

There is no organized effort to implement cost improvements.

There is some cost communication and follow up of cost.

Cloud cost is communicated regularly to our employees.

Spending is tracked and drives cost improvements tasks.

4. To which degree would you say your organization uses metadata (tagging) to have control/visibility of spend and allocation?*

Not at all / Don’t know

Some resources are tagged, but there is no enforcement.

Tagging is widely used but lacks uniformity.

Tagging is enforced for all resources.

Tagging is enforced for all resources and tags include all spend specific categories (allocation, shared resource details, lifecycle).

5. To which degree would you say that you review your cloud spending in cycles?*

Not at all / Don’t know

We have no organized interval for reviewing spend.

We have a yearly interval for reviewing spend and implementing improvements.

We have a bi-annual interval for reviewing spend and implementing improvements.

We constantly review spend and incentivise suggestions for functional improvements.

Back Next Step

Step 3 out of 6

Operational excellence

1. To which degree do you have some DevOps way of working?*

No / Don’t know

We are a development company, but no agreed-upon development process is in place.

Some development best practises are followed for applications.

We follow some development best practises for both applications and infrastructures.

DevOps is a well-known company practise.

2. To which degree have you automated your Cloud environment (IaC)?*

No / Don’t know

There are no plans to use IaC.

All implementation is done by click-ops.

Some critical infrastructure is maintained as IaC code.

All infrastructure is written as code, revised, and maintained for review and revision.

3. To which degree are you running CI/CD pipelines?*

No / Don’t know

There are no plans to use CI/CD in the near future.

We are planning to introduce CI pipelines.

We have implemented CI pipelines.

We have implemented CI & CD pipelines according to industry best practises.

4. To which degree do you actively follow up on the health of your infrastructure?*

No / Don’t know

We rely on the Cloud’s robustness.

We do best effort in maintaining the environment.

We have agreed upon and communicated the SLA in place.

Operational excellence is on top of our mind, and we adhere to our SLA’s.

5. To which degree are you improving your operations?*

No / Don’t know

There are no agreed upon plans in place for operational improvements.

Operational improvements is a best effort task.

We have quarterly improvement tasks planned.

We have a dedicated team to implement improvements.

Back Next Step

Step 4 out of 6

Reliability engineering

1. To which degree are you monitoring your Cloud workloads?*

No / Don’t know

There is no or little monitoring on workloads.

Some workloads are monitored for changes in capacity.

Critical workloads are monitored for changes in capacity.

All Cloud workloads are identified and monitored.

2. To which degree do you have incident action planning in place?*

No / Don’t know

No identified incident action plan is in place.

High level incident plan for major systems is in place.

Detailed incident plan for all systems with runbooks is in place for operation teams to handle and escalate incidents if needed.

Detailed incident plans and runbooks is in place for all systems and are viewed/updated regularly.

3. To which degree do you review lessons learned from past incident responses?*

No / Don’t know

Incidents are handled on best effort basis and thus are not followed up.

Conduct postmortems of major incidents and discuss the lessons learned.

Conduct postmortems of all incidents regularly and lessons learned are shared with the relevant stakeholders.

Conduct postmortems of all incidents regularly and employs tools (GitHub projects/Azure DevOps boards) to track and improve system/processes to avoid future incidents and use tools (teams channels/slack/confluence etc.) to share major learnings across teams.

4. To which degree do you perform capacity planning on an ongoing basis?*

No / Don’t know

There is little, or no capacity planning performed.

There are some high-level graphics on capacity.

High-capacity events are identified, for example black Friday planning.

All traffic is monitored and analysed for future capacity needs.

5. To which degree is a disaster recovery process in place that is tried and tested?*

No / Don’t know

We don’t perform any type of recovery testing.

We perform a “classroom” recovery testing at least once a year.

We perform a “classroom” recovery testing at least twice a year and we constantly update our recovery plan.

We perform full recovery testing at least once a year and we constantly update our recovery plan.

Back Next Step

Step 5 out of 6

Performance

1. To which degree is your architecture design based on Cloud best practices, such as scaling in and out on a demand basis?*

No / Don’t know

Over provisioned resources to meet the demand.

Manual scaling.

Auto scaling enabled.

Auto scaling enabled with operational procedures in place to change min. and max. instances if needed.

2. To which degree is there a performance test strategy in place, that encompass testing all stages such as load testing, stress testing, API testing, and client-side/browser testing?*

No / Don’t know

Performance testing is done for some parts of the workload and is not done regularly.

Performance testing will be done by all teams while releasing a new feature but is not performed for subsequent changes.

Performance testing is done by all teams on a regular basis (multiple times a year).

All teams have defined their performance baselines and integrated performance testing as part of CI build pipeline.

3. To which degree do you consistently monitor your Cloud workload performances, reflecting bottlenecks and over-availability?*

No / Don’t know

Some of the application components are monitored for performance, but no monitoring of Azure resources or activity logs.

Some of the application components and Azure resources are monitored for performance.

All major application components and Azure resources are monitored for performance.

All application components and Azure resources are monitored for performance and are correlated to predict trends.

4. To which degree do you use log aggregation over the whole environment to gain input over all components?*

No / Don’t know

Some of the application and/or Azure resource logs are enabled but no standard solution for log aggregation.

All major application and Azure resource logs are collected but no standard solution for log aggregation.

All major application and resource logs are aggregated in a unified solution.

All application and resource logs are aggregated in a unified solution and are correlated to get insights.

5. To which degree have you mapped out performance trade-offs, such as performance versus cost and security?*

No / Don’t know

Aware of this concept but is not practised while designing/developing systems.

Some systems are designed after considering performance trade-offs against security, reliability, cost, and operability.

All major systems are designed after mapping performance trade-offs against security, reliability, cost, and operability.

Performance baselines of all the systems is defined and thus, are designed after mapping performance trade-offs against security, reliability, cost, and operability.

Back Next Step

Step 6 out of 6

Sustainability

1. To which degree do you understand and report on Cloud sustainability metrics for your cloud environment?*

Not at all / Don’t know

We have a basic understanding of Cloud sustainability metrics.

We have an advanced understanding of Cloud sustainability metrics.

We have an advanced understanding, and we have regular manual reporting.

We have an advanced understanding and frequent automated reporting.

2. To which degree are Cloud sustainability targets defined and communicated in your organization?*

Not at all / Don’t know

We have communicated sustainability as a goal, but nothing specific.

We have communicated specific sustainability goals, but no goals for Cloud.

We have communicated specific Cloud sustainability targets and goals.

We frequently communicate cloud-specific goals and metrics to all users of the cloud.

3. To which degree would you estimate your Cloud footprint as optimized regarding usage? (On/off, Rightsized, Scaling in/out, Idle resources, Serverless>VM)*

Not at all / Don’t know

Wasted consumption is between 15-30%.

Wasted consumption is between 5-15%.

Wasted consumption is estimated to be less than 5%.

Wasted consumption is estimated to be less than 2%.

4. To which degree would you say you are replacing VM-based applications with containers or Shared serverless services?*

Not at all / Don’t know

We have a lot of VM’s and we’re keeping it that way.

We have a lot of VM’s but are modernizing as fast as possible.

We have modernized most of our applications for cloud.

We have modernized all our applications and use serverless when feasible.

5. To which degree are you actively working to reduce the downstream sustainability impact of your cloud work?*