During a cloud migration, your company’s key assets are vulnerable. Mission-critical data is in transit, and applications are being moved to the cloud. When data is being moved along the network, it is prone to being lost, stolen, or compromised, and some applications may not run in the cloud.
As error prone as migrations can be, security risks shouldn’t prevent your company from carrying out a safe and successful migration.
Planning is the key to overcoming security risk during cloud migration.
Understanding the Risks of Cloud Migration
Before migrating data and applications to the cloud, companies should have a good understanding of the risks involved. After all, better the devil you know.
Taking part in a risk assessment while planning your move to the cloud will uncover any risks and vulnerabilities so they can be eliminated ahead of time.
Having a security service provider conduct the assessment will uncover gaps you may not have been aware of. By revealing hidden vulnerabilities, the results of the assessment will help you include the right security measures in your migration plan.
Taking the Move Step by Step
The migration should be conducted in stages to control the level of risk. Cloud migrations involve moving large volumes of potentially sensitive data, as well as applications that are instrumental to company operations.
Carrying out a migration in stages allows your company to plan for or even avoid downtime. While unplanned downtime can be costly, a well-planned migration can schedule downtime so that it makes less of an impact on production. When users are aware of how the migration will affect their data and applications, they can make adjustments to lessen the impact of any potential interruptions.
By moving data and applications in smaller batches, your business can reduce exposure to threats and adapt security measures to the requirements of the information and workloads involved in a particular step of the migration process.
Prepping Your Applications
Applications are essential to company operations and customer experience. Unfortunately, applications are susceptible to compatibility issues when moved to the cloud.
Before a migration, all applications should be updated, patched, and checked for compatibility with the cloud. Updates and patches will reduce the chance that applications will suffer a successful cyberattack. Incompatible applications can be kept on-premises, upgraded to cloud-native applications, or switched to a software as a service (SaaS) option.
Reworking Your Approach to Security
In the lead-up to migration, your company should rethink its approach to security based on the risks of the process. Moving applications and data to the cloud creates identity and access management issues that need to be resolved using the right tools and policies.
Centralizing security management and creating uniform security policies will ensure that all the data and applications stored and running in the cloud are protected. Cloud migration is a great opportunity to revamp your overall security strategy so that it functions better once the migration has been completed.
Preventing Cloud Migration Security Risk
As with most security strategies, taking a proactive approach to cloud migration security is best. To avoid risk, security should be top of mind as you are planning your cloud migration.
To better prepare for the risks involved in cloud migration, it’s crucial to not only plan carefully but also understand common security challenges. For more insights, check out our article Top 3 Cloud Migration Security Challenges, where we discuss issues like data exposure, misconfigurations, and the lack of cybersecurity expertise. Addressing these challenges ahead of time can help ensure a smoother and safer migration for your business.
KNZ Solutions provides cloud services, including migration strategies, for businesses, state, local, and education (SLED) organizations, and government agencies.
We are a Cisco® Gold Integrator partner, so we have the deep expertise related to network security that is required to protect data and applications during the migration process. We can help your company design a cloud migration plan that keeps your important assets and information safe.
