Discover the key strategic factors to consider before embarking on a cloud migration.

Denver, CO, January 17, 2022— During the pandemic, businesses went all-in on accelerating revenue growth, leveraging digitization and planning transformation initiatives. Now, in the face of recessionary pressures and in a climate of global economic volatility, the focus has flipped to bottom-line performance. Cost-savings and efficiency are now the top priorities.

According to Gartner, global spending on technology, including cloud services, is expected to rise about 3% this year. This is significantly below the 10% annual growth seen in 2021 and the 7% growth of 2020. What does this mean for businesses? It means legacy applications and hybrid application environments are here to stay and companies will look to maximize their investments in existing technology.

In a hybrid cloud scenario, both on-premise and cloud estates are merged together to build a composite solution. For example, business-critical and security-focused Oracle/SAP ERP systems are run on-premise, while other microservice-based applications are deployed in the cloud.

Without the right planning and pacing, cloud migration strategies are liable to fall flat. A 2019 study from Fortinet found that 74% of companies have moved applications back to on-premise from the cloud after failing to achieve the anticipated returns.

Here are some of the key risks that organizations embarking on a cloud migration strategy should keep in mind:

Neglecting security issues

Data protection is critical to any business. And with on-premise data centers, organizations have complete control over their infrastructure and security. Building a robust data protection system within this environment can be relatively straightforward: changes and updates are deployed efficiently and as required, and both internal and external audits are conducted efficiently – even using third-party software.

When businesses store data in the cloud, the data centers and the regions for storing the data are not reserved solely for the business in question. While businesses can choose the location for their data, they often cannot be accessed or uniquely identified. The physical security of the hardware and data centers is managed by the cloud vendors – customers only leverage their services.

The steps to securing cloud architectures differ greatly to those on-premise, but many organizations don’t modify their existing security policies to account for the new cloud paradigm. Due to the potential external facing nature of cloud infrastructure, there’s a heightened risk of service exposure or public access. These risks could take the form of unsecured APIs, administrator access or unintended access to services. Incident response and hardening procedures must be updated to reflect the cloud environment.

Cloud migration plans will only succeed with an accompanying comprehensive security policy. If an organization fails to identify sensitive data and security risks during an assessment of its infrastructure, it risks data loss, data leaks, and multiple other security breaches. By identifying critical data, creating centralized security policies, and enforcing compliance and infrastructure-wide secure access protocols, businesses can mitigate against security threats.

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