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4 Security Considerations When Moving to the Cloud

The cloud is a vital technology for your business in 2024. With so many benefits in performance, cost, and security, the cloud is indeed turning out to be the future of the business landscape. But while the cloud has many advantages when it comes to security, there are also many considerations that need to be made when moving to the cloud.

After all, as with any migration strategy, maintaining high standards of security is vital to ensure that the process of moving to the cloud is successful. Making sure that you don’t slip up on this can be the difference between having robust and all-encompassing security and creating vulnerabilities that could put your organisation at risk.

In this blog, we’ll discuss four different security considerations when moving to the cloud. These include data security, network security, access control, and compliance. We’ll delve into each of these areas, providing you with a comprehensive understanding of the security aspects of cloud migration and how to ensure that your business has an excellent security strategy today.

Implementing Robust Encryption Protocols

While cloud services offer robust security for storing your data, the process of transporting your data is a different story. During this phase, your data is vulnerable and requires protection. Failing to implement robust encryption protocols at this stage could expose your data to potential threats, emphasising the urgency of this security measure.

Encryption is not just a method; it’s your best defence. It scrambles all your data, making it inaccessible without the key to decipher it. This means that even if someone manages to intercept your data during transit, they won’t be able to access it without the key. Encryption is a fundamental component of cloud security. It ensures that your data remains confidential, even if it’s stored or transmitted over untrusted networks. It’s a powerful layer of security that ensures your most important data remains safe during the migration process.

Encryption is also useful afterwards. It stops your data from being accessed in the case of a successful breach into your organisation, as the data will still be encrypted and inaccessible. This means that you have another layer of security if your company gets breached by someone gaining access to credentials, for example.

It’s not just a suggestion, it’s a requirement. Many data protection and compliance regulations mandate the use of encryption to store sensitive information and data securely. If you haven’t already, it’s time to start looking at encryption and incorporating it into your organisation’s practices, including your cloud implementation post-migration.

Strengthening Access Control Mechanisms

Of course, even if your security protects you from direct attacks, social engineering and other access-based attacks are still dangerous. After all, if someone bypasses your access control mechanisms, they’ll gain access to your whole organisation. 

Your role in this process is crucial. By strengthening these processes and ensuring they’re tight and strong enough to stop breaches and attacks, you are actively contributing to the security of your organisation. This means using robust tools that offer options for multi-factor authentication and allow you to implement zero-trust access control policies, empowering you to keep your data security tight and ensure that you’re secure in every possible way.

Tools like Microsoft Entra ID work as an identity management system to manage who has access to your system and facilitate processes such as single sign-on and multi-factor authentication to ensure that your business can keep unauthorised personnel away from your data.

Establishing a Continuous Monitoring System

In the modern world, you must be proactive when dealing with threats to your organisation. Otherwise, you risk failing to catch newer threats that could be too fast or too far under the radar to react to. 

A continuous monitoring system will keep you proactive while providing more information about your business’s security posture. This will allow you to create an all-encompassing security monitoring strategy that will raise your security posture overall. This will also allow you to identify more minor problems and prevent those issues from becoming threats down the line.

By using a continuous monitoring system to protect your organisation, you are not only enhancing your security but also giving yourself more efficiency and faster response time. This system will provide you with real-time insights into system performance, allowing you to make the whole process more efficient and effective. This reassurance should instil a sense of confidence in your security strategy.

Ultimately, all these mean that using a continuous monitoring system will let you create a centralised system that can take care of all monitoring within your business and ensure that there’s a central point where you can take proactive measures against threats your organisation might face.

Correct Decomissioning On-Premises Servers

When migrating to the cloud, you must decommission your organisation’s on-premises server hardware to correctly remove it from your system. However, doing this correctly is vital, as failing to do so can mean that you might cause gaps in your security posture.

The first step is to plan your decommissioning strategy and create a list of tasks to ensure you do the following steps to decommission correctly.

Here are the steps you should take to decommission:

  1. Data Backup: Data backup is vital to ensuring that your data is safe in case of issues during transit.
  2. Data Transfer: Transfer data from your on-prem system to the cloud.
  3. Software Removal: The next step is to uninstall all applications and services running on the server to ensure that all software is uninstalled correctly and without any issues.
  4. Account Removal: Next, you’ll need to securely remove all user accounts. Not doing so can risk credentials being accessible on the hardware and causing problems in the future.
  5. Data Wipe and Disconnect: The final step is to wipe the data from the drive, power down, and disconnect. This will ensure that you don’t leave any data on your system that could be extracted and used in the future and disconnect your hardware from your system.

By following these steps and working with a trusted provider, you can ensure that your cloud migration goes smoothly.

How We Can Help

Cloud migration is essential in the modern world but requires a lot of forethought. Regarding security, many steps must be considered to ensure that the migration process goes as smoothly as possible.

If you’re looking to get started with cloud migration but don’t know where to begin or simply require assistance along the way, reach out to us today. Our experts will provide you with a helping hand and ensure that your cloud migration goes smoothly and successfully.

Get in touch now and see how we can help.