Cloud Migration Must-Haves: Security, Compliance, Availability

“Look before you leap” may be an old proverb, yet it’s as pertinent as ever when it comes to cloud migrations. The better prepared the organization is, the better the business outcomes.

To better understand the considerations businesses must take into account, we spoke with William Bell, Executive Vice President of Products at phoenixNAP, a global IT services provider with expertise in helping organizations migrate to the cloud.

Bell said that among the challenges, “First is app preparedness, and understanding the target destination, which is related. You may potentially have to rearchitect some apps to fit inside the public cloud. Many people look at the cloud as a one-way destination, thinking they’re going to move applications there and still do things the way they did before, just with someone else hosting their infrastructure. In reality it can be difficult to get the same level of uptime while keeping costs low.”

Security, sprawl, performance: Cloud considerations

He also highlighted the importance of security and compliance, which have been challenging IT departments for more than a decade. “We advise our customers that security becomes a shared responsibility in the cloud. The way to succeed is to understand the security model the provider is offering, and what you both need to do to secure your systems and maintain compliance. It can vary wildly depending on the data destination and who is helping you achieve security responsibilities. We believe that by marrying the right cloud service or platform with managed services, you can get a much-improved security stance than before.”

Companies today are increasingly shifting to a hybrid, multi-cloud environment — putting some data in public clouds while also maintaining their own private cloud platforms. Bell advises to take caution when doing so, as this strategy can lead to data sprawl.  “The more mobile the data, the more multi-cloud, the greater the risk to uptime and availability and security,” he said. “Understanding where the data is can help prevent risks and help avoid performance impacts that might occur in a multi-cloud environment.”

Cloud also plays a role in business continuity and disaster recovery. “Let’s look at ransomware. The number one way to secure against ransomware is to maintain an uncorrupted backup. In that way, availability is the core component of security. To that end, we’ve created a business-continuity/disaster recovery target destination in the cloud that provides a higher level of assurance for our customers, and we can do that out-of-the-box, so the customer doesn’t have to worry about data transformation. No heavy lifting, and safe in case of disaster.”

PhoenixNAP recently became Cloud Verified, which Bell sees as a big plus for customers. “It offers them the assurance of stability, configuration, and compatibility between what they are doing on premises and in the cloud, so all their investments aren’t going to be consumed by a cloud service,” he said.

 “VMware Cloud Verified helps businesses of all sizes,” Bell said. “Although we have large enterprise clients, we also provide a real value to those customers who don’t have huge IT organizations.”

Click here to find out more about phoenixNAP and its comprehensive cloud, security, and disaster recovery offerings.