4 Security Considerations When Moving to the Cloud

29 May 4 Security Considerations When Moving to the Cloud

Posted at 15:30h in Cloud by Simon Spencer

The cloud is a vital technology for your business in 2024. With so many benefits in performance, cost, and security, the cloud is truly 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 a lot of 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 article, we’re going to go over four different security considerations that you should make when moving to the cloud, as well as how you can get started with ensuring that your business has a great security strategy today.

Implementing Robust Encryption Protocols

While cloud services will have robust security for storing your data, transporting your data is a different story. During transportation, your data is vulnerable and will need to be protected.

Encryption is the best method for this. It scrambles all of your data and makes it inaccessible without the key to decipher it, meaning that anyone who manages to get your data during transit will not be able to access your data without said key. It’s another layer of security that will ensure your most important data can’t just be snatched during the migration process.

On top of this, encryption is still useful afterwards too. 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 in the case that your company gets breached by someone gaining access to credentials, for example.

Moreover, many data protection and compliance regulations require you to use encryption to store sensitive information and data, to ensure that it is stored securely. This means that if you haven’t already, you need to start looking at encryption and using it within your organisation, including with 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 a danger. After all, if someone bypasses your access control mechanisms, they’ll gain access to your whole organisation.

With this, you must strengthen these processes, to ensure they’re tight and strong enough to stop breaches and attacks. This means using robust tools that have options for multi-factor authentication and allow you to implement zero-trust access control policies, 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 be able 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 any unauthorised personnel away from your data.

Establishing a Continuous Monitoring System

In the modern world, you need to be proactive when dealing with threats towards 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 let you remain proactive while also having more information about your business’ security posture, letting you create an all-encompassing security monitoring strategy that will raise your security posture all-around. This will let you identify smaller problems too, and prevent those issues from becoming threats down the line.

By using a continuous monitoring system to protect your organisation, you also give yourself more efficiency and faster response time all around. You can use the monitoring system to track system performance within your company and use that information to make the whole process more efficient and effective all around.

Ultimately, all of 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 that your organisation might face.

Correct Decomissioning On-Premises Servers

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

The first thing to do is plan your decommissioning strategy and create a list of things to do, to ensure that you undertake all of the following steps to ensure that you decommission correctly.

Here are the steps you should take to decommission —

Data Backup: Data backup is vital to ensuring that your data is safe, in case of issues during transit.
Data Transfer: This is the process of actually transferring data from your on-prem system to the cloud.
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.
Account Removal: Next, you’ll need to remove all user accounts securely. By not doing so, you can risk credentials being accessible on the hardware and causing problems in the future.
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, as well as letting you disconnect your hardware from your system.

By following these steps, and making sure that you work 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 is a process that requires a lot of forethought. When regarding security, there are a multitude of steps that you need to consider, 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 you simply just require assistance along the way, reach out to us today. Our experts will provide you with a helping hand and will ensure that your cloud migration goes smoothly and successfully.