Cloud Adoption and Implementation
The Cloud Adoption and Implementation domain tests the decision and delivery work: building the business case, assessing readiness, choosing a migration approach, selecting a provider, negotiating SLAs and planning an exit. Questions here are scenario-based and reward candidates who count the costs others forget.
Building the case
A credible case compares total cost of ownership, not list price. Include migration and refactoring effort, integration with remaining on-premises systems, network and egress charges, training, licence changes, dual-running during transition, and ongoing governance. Benefits to quantify: avoided capital spend, faster provisioning, elasticity against demand peaks, and resilience.
Choosing a migration approach
Commonly cited patterns, whose names vary between sources, are: rehost (lift and shift), replatform (minor tuning to gain cloud benefits), refactor or re-architect (redesign for cloud-native operation), repurchase (move to a different SaaS product), retain and retire. Rehosting can reduce initial code changes, while refactoring can enable new operating capabilities. Actual speed, risk, cost and benefit depend on dependencies, support terms, architecture and the business objective.
Provider selection and contracts
Assess service catalogue fit, SLA commitments, security certifications, data location, support model, roadmap and exit terms. The SLA states measurable service levels and remedies such as service credits; it is not a guarantee that nothing fails.
Worked example
A company compares a five-year on-premises refresh at 500,000 in capital plus 60,000 annual running cost against cloud at 130,000 per year. Reasoning: on-premises totals 500,000 + (5 × 60,000) = 800,000. Cloud totals 5 × 130,000 = 650,000, before adding 90,000 of one-off migration and integration. The honest comparison is 740,000 against 800,000 - a modest saving, not the 150,000 the naive comparison suggests. The exam rewards recognising that migration cost and egress change the answer.
Traps that cost marks
- Comparing subscription fees with fully loaded on-premises cost.
- Ignoring egress, integration and dual-running costs.
- Treating an SLA as a warranty of availability rather than a remedy mechanism.
- Adopting with no exit strategy, so lock-in is discovered at renewal.
- Migrating everything at once instead of proving the approach on a bounded pilot.