Tips and tricks for securing data when migrating to the cloud
Tips and tricks for securing data when migrating to the cloud
Find out how you can have a safe and secure transition to the cloud. This guide describes tips and steps to take to ensure your data is secure during a migration.
More and more organizations are moving mission-critical systems and data to the cloud. While migration to and between all types of cloud services poses security challenges, migration to and between public cloud services presents the greatest security challenge, with potentially dire consequences.
In this guide, we’ll cover some of the most common security threats companies face during cloud migration as well as best practices you can follow to combat these threats.
According to theFlexera State of the Cloud Report 2022, public cloud adoption continues to accelerate, with half of all study respondents’ workloads and data residing in a public cloud. As a consequence of this growth, there are also growing concerns about data security during cloud migration.
Some of these security concerns include the following.
The application programming interfaces used to connect cloud applications, data and infrastructure can be a major source of vulnerability for cloud data security. APIs may have weak authentication and authorization controls, a lack of sandbox protection, and excessive privileges. Organizations should carefully assess these vulnerabilities when migrating data to the cloud.
Cloud data can also be at risk because of security blind spots in the cloud infrastructure. Issues such as using software-as-a-service applications for sensitive data and creating shadow IT networks are common in some cloud environments. Organizations should be aware of these potential vulnerabilities when migrating to the cloud and take steps to mitigate them.
Many organizations must comply with regulatory requirements when migrating data to the cloud. Security compliance requirements can be a significant challenge for organizations, especially if the cloud provider does not meet these requirements.
Finally, migrating data to the cloud can increase the risk of data loss. This is especially true if the cloud provider does not have robust controls in place to protect and recover data in the event of a security incident.
While there are many potential security problems that can arise during a cloud migration, there are also several steps your team can take to better protect your applications and data. We recommend the following seven tips to protect your organization’s data during cloud migrations.
Companies preparing for a cloud migration need to make sure they have an accurate understanding of their data and its requirements. That means migration teams must be aware of their data’s present and future usage as well as storage and retention policies established by the company’s data governance framework.
Various cloud management tools are available to assist with some of these data understanding and optimization tasks, including data deduplication software. Securing cloud data starts with understanding what it contains and how it will eventually be used and/or disposed of.
In addition to understanding the data itself, organizations need to be aware of any compliance requirements that apply to their datasets during cloud migrations.
