Planning a move to the cloud? There are lots of resources out there focused on the benefits of this move, which can help set your organization up for success by leveraging a more flexible and secure system.
However, there are important cloud migration challenges that should be taken into account when planning your move. The security concerns when migrating to the cloud should always be considered, as well as other risks, especially if your team doesn’t have dedicated cloud expertise.
Fortunately, with experts on your side, these challenges can be managed so they do not impact your migration and setup. Using a tool like Threater can also help. This is the only SaaS application that can block threats at scale on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge for all protocols. The more companies are unsure of their internet security, the more critical it becomes for them to proactively block threats before they reach the network.
Cloud Migration Challenges
Understanding the most prevalent cloud migration risks and challenges is pivotal for any project’s success. Without this knowledge, companies may not be able to address and mitigate these potential issues before they spin out of control and create issues further down the line.
To help provide you with the knowledge you need to successfully steer your next cloud migration, let’s delve into the most common cloud migration challenges.
1. Lack of a Defined Outcome
If a company’s leadership doesn’t understand the desired outcome for their cloud migration, it’s very difficult to ensure the solution they create actually meets their needs. This can easily lead to poor results for the project and cause feelings of resentment that so much money and time was spent on a solution that fails to meet (poorly-defined) expectations.
To mitigate this issue, IT and company leadership must map applications to the expectation of their desired outcomes. Only then can they ensure they have the capital, operational intelligence, and budget necessary to accomplish these goals.
Determining a desired outcome before taking action provides a sensible framework leadership can use to plan their approach and distribute resources accordingly.
2. Application Mapping and Network Complexity
Another common challenge in migrating to the cloud is ensuring all application access is correctly mapped according to LAN/WAN perimeters. This type of networking is fundamental to a successful cloud deployment. If the mapping isn’t optimized, it can lead to lost latency and other performance issues that make your cloud environment less effective.
Having multiple paths to your data and maintaining secure user connections will both help ensure that the complexity of your network is minimized.
3. Security for Internet-Based Access to the Cloud
Many modern networks are implementing hybrid technologies for application-aware prioritization. However, leveraging the internet for your production applications can be concerning. There are dangers inherent to using any internet-based connection since cybercriminals have become so adept at exploiting any vulnerability to gain access to your network.
All users, applications, and other entities connected to your network through the cloud must be secure. The security of your user connections, in particular, is paramount.
To face this challenge, your team must first determine how users are connecting to your cloud. What are the ingress or egress points? Then you must ask: how does your data center fit into the equation?
Once these points are determined and the cybersecurity of these access points evaluated, it’s easier to ensure the ongoing security of your new cloud solution.
4. Internal Networking Issues
Several internal networking issues can quickly be revealed during a cloud migration if the implementation team doesn’t take care to minimize these problematic interactions. Depending on where employees enter the network, they could experience issues contingent on the solution chosen and access control, which while a great way to stop attacks, doesn’t always get them all.
To mitigate this issue, organizations must determine whether they would be best served by a private cloud, a public cloud, or hybrid environment. Which option is best for your organization depends on the applications you use and the data you host.
5. Global Scope
For large global organizations, there are significant cloud migration risks that mitigation can help prevent. When addressing this issue, cybersecurity professionals must consider not only the fact that global organizations have a large number of staff but also the fact that that staff is spread out around the world. These networks must span the entire globe, providing an additional implementation challenge.
To ensure success, organizations must work with networks and carriers that offer appropriate global support and maintenance. Businesses must also evaluate security and compliance concerns that may arise, depending on their operating jurisdictions.
Setting up open lines of communication and collaboration across your organization, including departments such as IT, legal, and compliance, will help ensure the migration is a success.
6. Too Many Tools
Determining which tools (and which combination of tools) is best for your organization can be a challenge. With so many tools available to cloud users today, it can feel impossible to keep up or know what to do. And even if you do keep up, adding on every shiny new tool might not even be that beneficial.
Organizations looking to offload software, infrastructure, and even user desktops to the cloud can take advantage of the popular ‘as a service’ model, which involves an organization paying for remote hosting and management of these essential company resources. This takes work off your in-house IT and security staff and helps protect against downtime due to cybersecurity incidents.
Moving to the Cloud? Protect Your Organization with Threater
There are many benefits and risks of migrating to the cloud. However, one area that remains a continual concern for many organizations is cybersecurity. When working in a cloud environment, it can be challenging to identify and implement the security stack that will best protect your organization’s most vital digital assets.
Threater offers protective cybersecurity Threat Blocking-as-a-Service. We leverage the power of many threat intelligence feeds to protect your software, cloud, data, and users at line speed. Threater is a necessary piece in any security stack, including cloud-based delivery models and those that need to reach certain compliance standards.Want to learn more? Check out our latest eBook, The Threat Intelligence Challenges with Next-Generation Firewalls, to hear more about our approach to ensuring your security.
