After you’ve defined your cloud strategy – the “why” and “what success looks like” – the next step in Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) is the Plan phase.
This is where strategy meets structure. It’s about creating the governance, processes, and financial models that will guide every decision as you adopt Azure.
And this is also the stage where Turbo360 becomes a cornerstone for building your FinOps and governance baseline – ensuring cost control, accountability, and transparency are designed in before the first workload lands in the cloud.
The CAF Plan Phase: Turning Vision into a Blueprint
In the CAF, the Plan phase focuses on:
- Establishing governance and organizational alignment.
- Defining budgets, tagging, and accountability models.
- Creating the landing zone design to enforce security and compliance.
- Preparing the business case and migration plan for prioritized workloads.
The goal? To create a governed foundation that balances agility with control – and financial responsibility with innovation.
Where Turbo360 Fits
Turbo360 helps make the CAF Plan phase operational and measurable. It transforms governance and financial models from documents into live, enforceable, and automated controls. Here’s how
Define Cost Accountability with Scopes and Ownership
CAF goal: Map cost ownership to business units, applications, or environments.
Turbo360 solution:
- Use Custom Scopes to group Azure resources by project, department, or business unit – matching your CAF organizational structure.
- Assign cost owners and budget approvers to each scope, so accountability is clear.
- Generate reports that roll up to management groups or cost centers, giving both engineering and finance the same view of responsibility.
Example: Your marketing team has its own subscription, but its Azure resources sit in multiple resource groups. Turbo360 can create a unified financial scope for “Marketing Cloud Costs” and track them end-to-end.
Enforce Consistent Tagging Standards
CAF goal: Ensure consistent resource classification and chargeback.
Turbo360 solution:
- Use Tag Manager to detect and fix missing or inconsistent tags across subscriptions.
- Automate tag remediation policies – e.g., apply default values when tags are missing.
- Monitor tag compliance and highlight non-conformant resources on dashboards.
This helps you implement the CAF governance discipline of “resource consistency” – critical for reporting, chargeback, and optimization.
Tip: Align tags to key CAF categories like BusinessUnit, Environment, CostCenter, and Owner.
Budget Planning and Alerts
CAF goal: Set budgets that align with organizational priorities.
Turbo360 solution:
- Configure budgets per scope, workload, or environment.
- Set alert thresholds (e.g., 80%, 90%, 100%) to notify stakeholders before overspending occurs.
- Integrate with Service Now or Jira or email notifications to keep stakeholders proactive.
Turbo360’s budgeting capability bridges the gap between financial planning and operational monitoring – enabling cost predictability from day one.
Prepare Governance Dashboards for Stakeholders
CAF goal: Create visibility and accountability across teams.
Turbo360 solution:
- Build governance dashboards showing budget usage, compliance, and anomalies.
- Share real-time dashboards with business owners and leadership to foster transparency.
- Use role-based access controls to ensure each stakeholder sees relevant data.
This visibility empowers teams to self-correct and builds a shared FinOps culture – where cost efficiency is part of daily operations, not a month-end surprise.
Align Governance with Policy and Security Frameworks
CAF goal: Integrate financial governance into broader compliance policies.
Turbo360 solution:
- Use Turbo360 insights to help identify Azure Policy to enforce resource deployment rules.
- Detect drift or non-compliance (e.g., untagged resources, expensive SKUs) before they affect budgets.
- Combine security, compliance, and cost visibility in a single view.
This ensures your CAF landing zones are both technically secure and financially compliant.
Real-World Scenario
An enterprise IT team preparing for Azure migration wanted to establish a robust governance baseline.
They used Turbo360 to:
- Map business units to Custom Scopes.
- Automatically tag resources using Tag Manager.
- Define budgets for each environment.
- Build a dashboard for CIO and finance teams to track consumption in real time.
Within weeks, they had full visibility into ownership and spend patterns – allowing them to control cloud growth proactively, rather than reactively.
Why This Phase Matters
The Plan phase is where FinOps maturity truly begins. Without it, governance becomes reactive, and cloud costs spiral as teams deploy without accountability. Turbo360 ensures that governance is measurable, enforceable, and automated – laying the foundation for cost-efficient cloud operations later in the CAF journey.
What’s Next
With strategy and planning complete, it’s time to move into CAF’s Ready Phase – where you prepare and validate your landing zones.
In Part 4 of this series, we’ll explore:
“Preparing Your Azure Landing Zones for Cost and Operational Excellence“
You’ll see how Turbo360 integrates with your landing zone architecture to ensure cost visibility and automation are built in before you go live.
Final Thought
Governance isn’t a checkpoint – it’s the backbone of sustainable cloud adoption.
With Turbo360, your CAF planning phase becomes a living framework for cost accountability, transparency, and control – ensuring that every workload starts with FinOps discipline built in. Book your free Azure cost consultation
“Governance by design – not by hindsight.“
