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From On-Premises to Online: The Ultimate Cloud Migration Checklist

Are you ready to take your business to the next level and move from on-premises to online with a cloud migration strategy? As exciting as this may sound, it’s important not to rush into the process without proper planning. Fear not, because we’ve got you covered! In this blog post, we’ll provide you with the ultimate checklist to ensure a smooth and successful transition to the cloud. Whether you’re just beginning or in the final stages of migration, our comprehensive guide will help make sure no stone is left unturned.

 

Migrate to cloud button on keyboard

What is Cloud Migration and Why Migrate?

Cloud migration is the process of moving data, applications, or other business components from an on-premises environment to a cloud computing platform. There are many reasons why businesses migrate to the cloud, but the most common ones are to improve agility, scale operations more quickly or cost-effectively, or to take advantage of new features or functionality offered by a cloud provider. Cloud providers offer a pay-as-you-go model, which means you only pay for the resources you use. This can be a big advantage over traditional on-premises infrastructure, which often requires a large upfront investment.

 

Migrating to the cloud can also help improve your security posture. When you store data and applications off-site, in a secure data-center, you can protect them from physical disasters such as fires or floods. And because cloud providers have expertise in security, they often have stronger security controls than most businesses could implement on their own.

There are several different types of cloud migrations that businesses can undertake. The most common are lift-and-shift migrations, in which an organization moves its existing on-premises infrastructure and applications to the cloud without making any changes; rehosting migrations, in which an organization moves its applications to the cloud but keeps its existing infrastructure; and re-platforming migrations, in which an organization moves its applications to the cloud and makes changes to how they’re built or how they run.

 

Steps for a Successful Cloud Migration

  • Define your goals and objectives for the cloud migration. What are you looking to achieve by moving to the cloud?
  • Determine which workloads and applications you will move to the cloud. Not all workloads are suitable for the cloud, so it’s important to carefully consider which ones will make the most sense to migrate.
  • Assess your current infrastructure and application dependencies. What components of your on-premises infrastructure will need to be migrated or replaced in order to run in the cloud.
  • Evaluate your options for migrating to the cloud. There are a number of different ways to approach a cloud migration, so it’s important to choose the right one for your specific needs.
  • Plan and execute your migration strategy. Once you’ve determined how you’re going to migrate, it’s time to put that plan into action and get started with the actual process of moving your data and applications to the cloud.

 

Pre-Migration Tasks

Pre-migration tasks are critical to ensuring a smooth transition from on-premises to online. Here are some key things to do before beginning your cloud migration:

  • Assess your current infrastructure and identify which components can be migrated to the cloud.
  • Develop a cloud adoption strategy that outlines your goals, budget, and timeline for migrating to the cloud.
  • Evaluate different cloud providers and choose the one that best meets your needs.
  • Create a comprehensive backup of your on-premises data and systems.
  • Test your applications and systems to ensure they are compatible with the new cloud environment.

 

Post Migration Tasks

After you’ve successfully migrated your data and applications to the cloud, there are a few post-migration tasks that you should perform to ensure everything is up and running smoothly. Here’s a checklist of what you should do:

 

  • Verify that all data and applications have been successfully migrated.
  • Perform a comprehensive performance test of all migrated systems to ensure they are functioning as expected in the new environment.
  • Update your documentation to reflect the new architecture and configuration.
  • Modify any monitoring or management tools you use to reflect the new environment.
  • Adjust your backup and disaster recovery plan as needed for the new environment.
  • Notify all relevant parties (e.g., employees, customers, partners) of the successful migration and provide them with instructions on how to access the new system
  • Continuously monitor your usage and adjust your resources to optimize your costs. Cloud providers offer tools and services to help you monitor and manage your costs.
  • Security should always be a top priority. Implement security best practices and monitor your environment for potential vulnerabilities.
  • Cloud technology provides new opportunities for innovation. Explore new cloud services and features to improve your business processes and create new value for your customers.
  • Develop a disaster recovery plan to ensure your data and applications are protected in the event of a disaster or outage. Test your plan regularly to ensure it is effective.

 

Conclusion

Cloud migration is a crucial step for any business that wants to stay competitive in the digital world. With this ultimate cloud migration checklist, you have the necessary steps and considerations to ensure a successful transition from on-premises to online systems. Make sure you thoroughly plan out your strategy before executing it, as even small mistakes can cause major disruptions during key times. By taking the time to understand what needs to be done and checking off each step of this list, your business will benefit from a seamless transformation into the cloud.

 

Top listed Threats & Risks to Cloud Services and how to avoid them?

Top listed Threats & Risks to Cloud Services and how to avoid them

Many businesses have already shifted their workloads to the cloud in an effort to increase efficiency and streamline workloads. According to the Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report, roughly 90% of enterprises anticipate cloud usage will expand even further as a result of COVID-19. Even though the cloud has a lot of benefits to offer, it’s very important to highlight all the risks involved. A lack of understanding of cloud vulnerabilities and misconfigurations of cloud security settings can easily lead to cloud data breaches, as the enormous amounts of data, that cloud servers host, make them an attractive target for hacker attacks. Threats to cloud environments are in many ways related to the threats via in-house enterprise networks.  Pierre Gronau, the cloud security expert, reveals twelve risks and expresses specific recommendations to minimize the risk of abuse and externally enforced data loss.

 

Data Breach

A company is responsible for the protection of its data. In the case of a data breach that has become public, preliminary investigations, lawsuits, legal disputes, and the resulting loss of revenue, as well as a sustained loss of reputation, are threatened. Therefore, when choosing the cloud provider, special attention must be paid to physical and digital security controls.

 

Insufficient identity, credential, and access management

Data breaches and other attacks often result from lax authentication, weak passwords, and poor key or certificate management. IT departments have to weigh the benefits and risks in a balancing act: on one hand, there is the efficiency of centralizing identity. On the other hand waits for the danger that such a valuable central directory, the repository, represents a worthwhile target. Businesses should rely on multifactor authentication such as time passwords, phone-based authentication, and SmartCard access protection for greater security.

 

Unsafe interfaces

IT teams use interfaces and APIs to manage and interact with cloud services. This includes services that provide cloud provisioning, management, and monitoring. These APIs and interfaces are typically the most exposed part of a system because they are usually openly accessible over the Internet. The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) recommends security-oriented code reviews and rigorous penetration testing. Useful in this context are API security components such as authentication, access control, and activity monitoring.

 

System vulnerabilities

Organizations share storage, databases, and other resources in the immediate locale area, creating new attack surfaces and the potential for exploitable errors. However, IT teams can ease attacks on such system vulnerabilities with basic IT processes. One of these processes is speedy fixing. Change-control processes that address emergency patches ensure that all corrective actions are properly documented and reviewed by technical teams. The optimal time window for this is four hours.

 

Account takeover

Phishing, fraud, and software exploits are still successful. Cloud services add a new dimension to these threats as attackers enforce damaging activity, manipulate transactions, and change data. To avoid this, companies should monitor all accounts, including service accounts, to trace each transaction back to its human owner. The key is to protect each account’s credentials from theft.

 

Malicious insiders

The insider threat has many faces: a current or former employee, a system administrator, contractor, or business partner. The range of malicious actions ranges from forced data abuse to data theft. We can say that the game publisher Zynga learned a lot via his previous experience. In November 2016, employees copied a large amount of player data from the company’s Google Drive account to a USB stick. Goal: They wanted to join the competition after leaving the company. Systems that depend solely on the security of the cloud service provider are at the greatest risk. Protection provides effective logging as well as monitoring and auditing of administrator activities. To minimize the burden of access, organizations should work with encryption processes and keys, as well as quantitatively minimize access to systems.

 

Advanced persistent threats

The CSA identifies advanced persistent threats (APTs) as parasitic forms of attack. APTs infiltrate systems and then secretly exfiltrate data and intellectual property for extended periods of time. Possible entry points include direct attacks, targeted e-mail fraud, spear phishing, and attacks via USB drivers. To be prepared, IT departments need to keep abreast of the latest attacks. In addition, regularly updated awareness programs ensure that users remain alert and less susceptible to letting a parasite into the web.

 

Data loss

Reports of persistent data loss due to cloud provider errors have become extremely rare. Hackers, however, are still showing off their active side by permanently deleting corporate and data center cloud data to damage the company’s reputation. Here cloud providers recommend the distribution of data and applications, daily backup, and offsite storage. Compliance policies often dictate how long companies need to retain audit records and other documents – the loss of this data can have serious regulatory consequences.

 

Insufficient due diligence

Organizations that use cloud services without fully understanding these and the associated risks must accept commercial, technical, legal, and compliance risks. If development teams are not familiar with cloud technologies, operational and architectural issues can arise. At this point, developers must conduct a comprehensive due diligence process to assess the risks associated with their cloud services. The duty of care in the cloud environment is always and especially valid for cloud migrations, consolidation, and outsourcing.

Abuse and harmful use of cloud services

 

Hackers can use cloud services to support their criminal activities. An example is the use of cloud computing resources to crack an encryption key and launch an attack. Other examples of abusive interns include DDOS attacks, spam messages, and malicious content hosting. Therefore, customers should check in advance if their cloud provider offers a misuse reporting mechanism. Even though customers are not direct prey to malicious activity, abuse can still lead to service availability and data loss issues.

 

DoS attacks

Harassment or blackmail-motivated DoS attacks have been around for years. They have gained in importance thanks to cloud computing and are affecting the availability of cloud services. Systems can slow down to a crawl or fail completely. The Australian Bureau of Statistics was also confronted with such a catastrophic failure in 2016 when the agency tried to complete the first national census online. Despite various system tests and stress tests, the census website crashed and went offline the night of the census. No Australian was able to complete his census form. According to CSA, cloud providers tend to handle DoS attacks better than their customers. Protected is anyone who has a plan to mitigate attacks before they occur. This is the only way for administrators to access essential resources when they need them.

 

Shared Technology Vulnerabilities

Vulnerabilities in a shared technology, including infrastructure, platform, and application, pose a significant threat to cloud computing. If a vulnerability occurs at one level, it affects everyone. If an integral component is compromised, it exposes the entire environment to potential injury. To prevent this, the CSA recommends a deep defense strategy which is known as multifactor authentication.

It Takes Next Level Preparation to Achieve the Best of Your Cloud Migration

a cloud migration steps

Nothing is built for eternity in IT. Applications that were state-of-the-art ten years ago no longer meet the needs of agile enterprises. Every day, industry leaders are competing with digital upstarts that develop their business exclusively in the cloud. To fight this battle, Innovative CIOs are therefore migrating their applications and data management to the cloud.

They want to benefit from the flexibility, diversity, security, and scalability of powerful and highly available cloud services for their digital transformation. But you only unlock these potentials if you prepare yourself and your IT departments well enough. Here below is a five-step preparation to respond to the demand.

 

  1. Question everything and rediscover your business

Do not leave one stone on the other and analyze all previous processes. Ask the right questions: What needs to change? What are the consequences of migrating certain applications to the cloud? Which adjustments are necessary for the work processes, the responsibilities? Take all departments with you on your journey. As cloud migration means much more than the introduction of new technology, the entire organization to the last employee must understand where the journey is going, what is being done, and what needs to change. Rather, it means developing into an agile organization because the cloud also works with agile methods, since every four to six weeks is an update. So, a company is constantly benefiting from new and best practice solutions when it is ready to adapt. To keep pace with this rapidly changing infrastructure, the new cloud services need to be designed and implemented so that you and all departments move at the same pace. For many companies, this is a significant change.

 

  1. Define agile business processes to unlock all of the cloud potentials

If you have not yet established agile work processes, you will need to introduce them with cloud migration at the latest. Because the effects of constant updates circulate in all areas. The departments also need to be more agile to ensure continuous integration of new features. You need to involve senior executives in prioritizing and approving. The specialist departments and project teams will have to collaborate in the future like an interconnecting gearbox in a single machine. As the development tool spins faster to support agile processes, it also forces everyone else to spin faster. This may be annoying at first, but the long-term benefits will be enormous. The organization as a whole becomes more agile, which speeds up day-to-day operations and workflows. Product development, marketing, and sales can react much faster to market opportunities and competitive pressure. Developers can quickly implement new features to meet important customer needs. Thanks to the scalability of cloud applications, they can optimize IT investments along with the services they request.

 

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  1. Think networked in processes, technologies and especially in people

In the face of agile and accelerated processes, cloud migration is never just a technology introduction, but always a change process for the entire company. Ask about the effects on people and processes: which people are directly, and which are indirectly affected? Who needs to be hired and who needs further education? What effects does this have on the ongoing processes? In order to handle the three dimensions of people, processes, and technology equally, you need a change in the current management method.

 

  1. Set priorities and start with the easy-to-reach Quick Wins

The implementation of cloud migration is a complex challenge in which some tasks are highly useful and can be implemented quicker. Other areas, however, have a low benefit and require high expenditures. Prioritize all tasks with an XY matrix, where you divide the quadrants into high and low utility and low and high overhead. Then start with the implementation with the tasks that offer a high utility value with little effort. Such “quick wins” give their project energy and help to convince the skeptics. Tasks with little benefit and high effort can postpone your entire project. The intervening tasks should be sorted according to the organizational needs.

 

  1. Formulate your vision with clear goals and document your concept

Many cloud projects begin with an informal discourse that quickly brings about much agreement. It is better, however, to document the concept and to define the key factors in it. For example, a cloud migration project needs a vision with clear goals for the next one, three, and five years. Describe the benefit for your business and how it will evolve. Create a roadmap that defines competency progress and milestones. Sketch the solution architecture for full implementation and how your business will transform along the way. This document provides guidance to all project participants in the implementation process and ensures the long-term success of your company on the path to digital transformation.

 

4 Basic Tips for a Successful Transition to the Cloud

4 Basic Tips for a Successful Transition to the Cloud

IT managers nowadays have to deal with a wide variety of challenges that comes with migrating to the cloud. Although cloud usage has become widespread in recent years, some companies still feel that they have not yet reached the full potential of the cloud.

However, the reasons for this are easy to identify, and cloud usage can be optimized using a few basic measures. Transaction to the cloud successfully means having an experienced partner who know exactly your industry requirements and can answer the following questions before the move. Such as how large and complex is company’s data? How important are regulatory considerations? Are company’s current business applications cloud ready? How much your day-to-day operations can tolerate downtime depends on the type of the application involved and what service level agreement does the company require for a cloud environment? If the company decides to change the cloud provider in the future, can the data and applications migrate with them?

 

Once these questions are answered, IT team can choose their cloud partner who can provide a migration plan and offer a cloud customized solution. Keep in mind that performance, security and reliability must be maintained when moving to clouds. Approach the migration in smaller chunks and stay in close coordination with your cloud provider. The goal is for the entire migration to cause minimal disruptions. Here below are few basic tips for a successful cloud migration and management.

 

Prioritize security

In the cloud age, the security of IT applications plays a particularly important role. Before any move to the cloud, IT managers must go through a list of business applications and identify those that they want to migrate. Planning is the key in order to recover any disaster, risk management and other potential situations. As company’s highly sensitive data, which is also used regularly, is moved to these infrastructures or is already stored on the complex architecture of cloud infrastructures, it makes many IT managers sweat.

IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2020  has shown that despite a nominal decline from $3.92 million in the 2019 study to $3.86 million in the 2020 study, the average total cost of a data breach  was much lower for some of the most mature companies and industries and much higher for organizations that lagged behind in areas such as security automation and incident response processes.

With the right security measures, however, risks and financial losses can be significantly minimized. While you might expect it’s your cloud provider’s responsibility to take all security measures, it’s also one of the biggest responsibilities of the customer to ensure their data is secure. Here are some of the methods we recommend at Storm to keep yourself safe when using the cloud. IT managers can ensure their data is secure by using methods such as multi factor authentication, strong passwords, data encryption and regular backups.

 

Understand and Enforce your Cloud Governance Plan

When implementing cloud services, many companies fail to develop a clear governance plan from the start and then consistently adhere to it. Governance, may be defined as an agreed-upon set of policies and standards, which are based on a risk assessment and inclusive of audit, measurement, and reporting procedures, as well as enforcement of policies and standards. Most security leaks in the cloud are due to weak corporate governance practices. In a multi-enterprise or multi-platform cloud environment, a lack of governance can not only lead to the loss of highly sensitive data, but also to considerable financial losses.

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Therefore, from the start, companies must not only establish and implement chains of responsibilities, authority and communication to empower people but also establishing measurement, policy and control mechanisms to enable people to carry out their tailored roles and responsibilities towards the respective cloud infrastructure.

 

Prepare your IT teams for cloud

Another challenge that IT departments have to face is the lack of knowledge of employees on the subject of cloud infrastructures. Just like any new technology, your employees need to learn specific skills that allow them to successfully work with the cloud solutions you plan to integrate.  For IT departments, the switch to cloud computing requires not only a different skill set but a different mindset. In order to take all the benefits cloud has to offer, it’s impossible for companies to dive into it without prior training and intelligent strategy. A proper training has a significant impact on cloud adoption, and this is especially true for organizations that invest in more comprehensive training. Once employees undergo training, they can understand where their skills fit and where they can contribute.

 

Optimize the cloud performance

Performance optimization is one of the main reasons why companies switch to the cloud in the first place. Performance optimization on key areas including scalability, concurrency, response time and throughput optimization can help you run better on Cloud. In this optimisation company can correctly select and assign the right resources to a workload or application. Simply put, cloud optimization can help you reduce cloud infrastructure cost and improve your application performance. Once the workload performance, compliance, and cost are correctly and continually balanced against the best-fit infrastructure in real time, efficiency is achieved.

 

Conclusion

The change to the cloud does not happen overnight, nor does it happen with the flick of a finger. You have to invest time, resources, and fund to migrate your applications and data to the cloud successfully. Security risks, a lack of governance, a lack of expertise and performance problems are all challenges that discourage many companies from taking this step. However, as long as companies take a few basic measures, they are well on the way to a successful and secure migration to the cloud.

 

Source :

Cost of a Data Breach Report 2020

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