Fear is a primitive emotion—a survival response that evolved to keep us out of harm’s way. Unfortunately, fear can also prevent us from taking necessary steps that appear risky.
For example, many business owners and CEOs know they should be migrating their technology management to the cloud but resist because they fear such a move threatens their organization’s security.
That is a reasonable fear, but it’s gratifying when you realize that you can actually create a strategy to guarantee secure cloud migration.
Cloud migration, which is at the root of digital transformation, creates big opportunities for most organizations. Centralizing your network services and applications yields efficiencies that give you a more robust IT base—as well as access to powerful new AI tools. In addition, migrating to cloud infrastructure can deeply enhance your security position. But despite the well-deserved hype, the cloud is not a silver bullet, and migrating all of your data to the cloud is not easy.
To ensure the leap to the cloud is secure, many organizations—from medium-sized companies to enterprise firms and institutions such as banks, hospitals, and universities—partner with technology management companies that offer managed cloud services. First, let’s face the threats.
The difficulty of setting up and maintaining cloud infrastructure has, without a doubt, contributed to the spike in cybercrime we’ve witnessed for several years. Cloud services are still a relatively new species of technology, and traditional enterprise IT departments, in most cases, lack the training or experience to safely execute a move to the cloud. Meanwhile, the folks in the C-suite are understandably eager to keep up with their competition by joining the rush to the cloud.
As a result, threats to cloud security have created a situation that deserves an abundance of caution.
Evidence that the Cloud Can Be a Dangerous Place
The Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) found that in 2021, data compromises jumped 23% over the previous all-time high. The ITRC found that the dramatic rise in victims primarily resulted from unsecured cloud databases.
- Personal customer data—names, emails, passwords—accounted for more than 40% of 2021 data breaches. In addition to the immediate damage caused by such data losses, this stolen information gives cybercriminals keys to use for future breaches. This puts a lot of data stored in the cloud at risk.
- Most software developers today use open-source toolkits to build the applications that your organization relies on. Cybercriminals have access to the exact same tools. They use these software development kits to learn about weaknesses in apps that are in wide use. Still many organizations fail to employ an effective software development lifecycle process during cloud migration.
- As organizations ramp up their use of cloud services and resources, they wind up with a number of administrative consoles and interfaces. Quest refers to this as the “cloud control plane, “and studies show that many organizations do not have theirs properly locked down. This produces vulnerabilities to a wide variety of cyberattacks, and yet many cloud providers don’t have an effective control-plane strategy.
- Ransomware attacks, which doubled in each of the past two years, are now the number-one source of data compromises. The three most common attack vectors for ransomware gangs were cloud platforms, cloud apps, and remote workers connected to networks via the cloud.
Why You Should Push Toward Secure Cloud Migration
Migrating your data and applications to the cloud, where everything can be monitored and managed 24/7 by an expert team, centralizes all of your network services, and that’s a very big deal.
In the cloud, all of your technology is seamlessly updated to current versions. This one move ensures that all of your teams in every division are equipped with tools that are at least as good as those your competitors are using.
There are several other reasons why you should overcome your fear, at least enough to think hard about cloud migration.
- The cloud is the best way to protect your organization from a natural disaster, cyberattack, or simple power failure. With your data and applications living on the network of remote interconnected servers that we call the cloud; disaster recovery is a cinch.
There’s never been a better way to ensure business continuity. There is simply no reason to build your own offsite data center to store backups and host virtual machines. And by working with a managed cloud services provider, you guarantee security while freeing your IT team to focus on your core business requirements.
- The cloud offers unprecedented flexibility, and that can be invaluable to an organization seeking to grow. With steeply reduced capital costs, you can experiment with new products and services and innovate in ways never before possible.
- Cloud migration presents almost boundless opportunities, but again, it is not a silver bullet. Most organizations will find that they can simultaneously save money and create more value—in both the short and long-term. That may or may not be true for you.
I invite you to find out if it’s time for you to work with a managed cloud services provider to develop some robust cloud infrastructure and join the Digital Transformation Movement.
I hope you found this information helpful. As always, contact us anytime about your technology needs.
Until next time,
Tim
