The cloud is associated with multiple compelling benefits. However, when it comes to migrating to the cloud, it is natural to face a series of challenges. Failure to de-risk your cloud implementation can interfere with your cloud journey.
While there's always an option to hire a team of professionals to help you with smooth migration, having a team equipped with the required knowledge on board can help you identify and fix these migration challenges in a more efficient manner. Thus, cloud technology training is essential.
It can take several hours for a native security information system to migrate to the cloud, but a trained team can ensure a smooth and risk-free transition by making extensive preparations for potential challenges and complications. The key is to identify a backup and risk-free migration solutions to be able to responsibly transfer the operational data from the data centers to the cloud.
It is also important to realize and accept that the vulnerabilities and threats associated with cloud migration are ever-evolving, and the ones we list down below are by no means exhaustive. There could be several other risks and challenges you may consider depending on your business model, systems, missions, and data.
According to Forbes, 83% of enterprise workload will migrate to the cloud by 2020. With that huge number transitioning towards the cloud, it has become increasingly important to keep an eye for the risks, threats, and vulnerabilities in the system.
De-risk Your Cloud Implementation Strategy
Here are the important considerations you must account for to ensure you make the right cloud migration decision.
Applications to transfer
Most organizations fail to understand whether all the applications are suitable for the cloud. Usually, when the migration decision is made, all of the applications are transferred. It's important to know that not all apps are a good candidate for the cloud.
Eventually, most applications go through a lengthy cycle of wasted efforts - spending both time and effort on activities to prepare it for the transition, only to find out it is not really suitable for the cloud.
Having experts who have taken professional cloud training can help you prepare a comprehensive list of questions to help you identify the applications that shouldn't be on the cloud, to begin with. This can save you from spinning the wheels purposelessly.
Reduced Control and Visibility
During the transition process, it is natural for the organization to lose some control and visibility of certain operations and assets. This could become worse when organizations hire external services to carry out this task. This gives access to the external parties to learn about your business operations.
With cloud experts on board, experts can regularly analyze and monitor information about services, applications, users, and data, without relying on network-based logging and monitoring as all of it is already available on on-premises IT location.
Unauthorized Use
Ease of use and lower cost makes both SaaS and PaaS more desirable products. However, this increases the risk of more unauthorized use as the cloud services increase. Cloud service providers may not be able to keep an eye on the system throughout the course. Thus, it is important for an in-house team to take care of the present risks of unauthorized access to an organization.
This threat can also convert into an increase in data exfiltration and malware infection since the organization fails to protect resources it is not aware of. Eventually, this too could affect the control and visibility of an organization of its data and network.
Risk of Compromising on Management APIs
Cloud service providers can also expose an organization's management application programming interfaces (APIs) that are used by an organization to interact and manage with cloud services. These APIs are also used to manage, provision, monitor, and orchestrate their users and assets.
External providers can expose the APIs to a bigger threat and potential exploitation. On the other hand, a team of in-house experts can keep an eye for vulnerabilities in management APIs. This enables them to take better control of the management APIs to avoid attacks and save the assets from getting compromised.
Smartly Modernize Applications
It is important for an organization to figure out the modernization process for applications to take full benefits of the cloud capabilities. In case that doesn't happen, transitioning to the cloud may not work at all as it does not create any difference to the end result. Your anticipated ROI is lost.
Experts with proper cloud training can save an organization from getting into this trap. They leverage specific skills and automated tools to identify the parts of the applications that need to change. This gives business another change to transform its current hosting location as well as enables it to take maximum advantage of cloud economics.
Resolving Application Dependencies and Key Infrastructure
It's crucial to completely let go of the dependencies, or there will always be some risk of leaving some data or application behind in the current data center. In worse cases, it may not allow the application to work at all. This means you will have to bring the application back to the existing system from the cloud.
Experts utilize discovery tools to avoid such a situation. These tools identify all the interfaces of an application so that the entire application is moved to the cloud with all of its components.
The same approach is used for driving the rest of the migration processes for all the other applications. This helps resolve key infrastructure dependencies and also guarantees smooth operations of all applications moved to the cloud.
Migrating your entire data center to the cloud - especially if you have a number of applications running - can be quite daunting. Thus, it's crucial to have the right approach and expertise to overcome these common challenges.
To have a team of experts on board, offer them proper cloud training and let them use their knowledge and expertise to mitigate the risks that could befall companies, which aren't completely prepared for the move.
De-risk your Cloud Implementation Strategy Through Cloud Technology Training