There’s no silver bullet when it comes to cloud migration. However, the likelihood of a successful migration is boosted when organizations are aware of best practices.
The cloud and the migration process open an organization to a whole new world of security risks, including application vulnerabilities and exploitation, malware and ransomware, unsecured services, and more. With that said, if you plan and take a proactive approach, you will help to limit the risks and complete your journey in a much better position.
But the work doesn’t stop once the migration is deemed “complete.” In order to achieve an ongoing strong security posture, you must maintain continuous security throughout your cloud.
Once your organization is established on a shiny new platform, teams are eager to explore the new possibilities and cloud services available to them. But while all have good intentions, this can transform the cloud from a valuable tool to a security nightmare. Without proper processes and controls, your organization is going to find itself with cloud sprawl, meaning multiple teams starting new cloud projects across multiple cloud providers and even new operating systems.
Creating a consistent security posture across a hybrid cloud environment requires a balance of careful preparation and a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-jump-in mentality.
Here are four security considerations to help ensure that you are prepared and empowered to properly secure your cloud migration and future cloud projects without slowing down the process.
Apply the right security at the right place
Whether you’re running bare-metal workloads, virtual machines, containers, or serverless functions, each workload or application requires its own unique set of security capabilities to protect against known and unknown threats.
GDPR, HIPPA, PCI, FISMA standards
Understanding your organization’s compliance standards before starting on your cloud migration is essential to preventing future roadblocks.
Train and equip
Managing and securing a hybrid cloud is different than your data center. Equip your staff with the skillset needed to understand the cloud as well as they understand the data center today.
Early implementation
IT and security teams should work with developers to implement security earlier in the development pipeline, before workloads are pushed to production. This ensures vulnerabilities, malware, and configuration issues are found sooner.