One of the things you want to do before you start your journey is to put a plan or governance together.  This will help with keeping everyone honest and set the expectation on what is important to consider when building your solutions.  As you can see in the following figure, we look at governance from a design, execute, and review perspective to keep things simple.

This is meant to answer the questions as to “Why we do things”, “How we do things”, then how we verify and change our governance.  The “why” component becomes your vision and constraints such as regulatory obligations, privacy, or data related needs.  The “how” component is the required needs like policies, encryption, and so on, which can be implemented and controlled.  The “verify” component provides the verification of the implementation of the design, but also, we flexible enough to allow changes based on new innovations in the cloud.

Your journey to the cloud should provide the following key attributes:

• A more personalized and rich experience when engaging your customer
• A fast-moving transformation of products
• Empowering your employees to innovate
• Optimizing your organization through DevOps

Not that we have our plan, let’s look at how we get started using Azure.