Cloud Consulting Frameworks for Enterprise Digital Transformation

Abstract

Enterprise digital transformation increasingly runs through the cloud, yet most failures are not technical but structural: engagements lack a shared decision framework, migrations are sequenced by intuition, and business cases are asserted rather than calculated. This article assembles the established cloud-consulting frameworks into a single coherent engagement model and shows how a consultant uses them together. We organize the work into five phases (assess, strategize, plan, migrate/modernize, operate/optimize), apply the six capability perspectives of the Cloud Adoption Framework (business, people, governance, platform, security, operations) as cross-cutting lenses, ground architecture decisions in the six Well-Architected pillars, and use the 7 Rs disposition model — originating in Gartner's 5 Rs and expanded by AWS — to classify each workload. We formalize the parts of consulting that are quantitative: a weighted application-portfolio scoring model for disposition, a total-cost-of-ownership and ROI/payback calculation for the business case, and a maturity index for tracking progress. The result is a repeatable, defensible method for moving an enterprise to the cloud. Public, vendor-published frameworks are cited throughout.