Pros + Cons to Consider Before Migrating to The Cloud

For years now, the thought of migrating to “The Cloud” is one that many organizations shared interest in yet haven't leaped towards. With the many constraints, you’d think come with having your infrastructure on-premise, you’d think it would be a no-brainer for organizations to migrate to the cloud immediately.

Quick Links:

1. 17 Pros & Cons to Cloud Security
2. Should My Organization Migrate to the Cloud?
3. CQ Cloud Migration Checklist
   
   

However, we’re here, and organizations face the same caveats they would fifteen years ago.

We’re going to review some of the pros and cons that come with migrating your infrastructure to the cloud and why 41% of cybersecurity professionals have reported fractions in savings to what they would typically see outside of the cloud and record-high deployment turnarounds. We’ll also go over some of the barriers/concerns that cybersecurity professionals face when the idea of migration comes around.

17 Pros & Cons to Cloud Security 

Sometimes, the benefits outweigh the cons. Some of the early adopters of cloud computing have set the standard for how cloud computing is done today. Cloud providers that are referred to as a Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS), all generally serve the same purpose, and that’s to provide your business with a place to host its data. 

Pros 

1. Reduced Costs: Save your organization thousands of cybersecurity costs on infrastructure, renewals, and scheduled maintenance. Cloud could lead to cost-effective statistics when the cloud replaces certain functions and infrastructure of the organization.
   
   
2. Scalability: Being able to adapt to your organization’s current demands in workload is crucial. Moving to the cloud enables quicker and more efficient scalability within your organization’s infrastructure. In fact, organizations report being 51% more flexible and scalable once implemented.
   
   
3. Improved Internal Alliance: Operate more efficiently with the ability to connect employees and collaborate quicker on projects or any maintenance that needs to be performed to the cloud.
   
   
4. Mobility: Migrating your data to the cloud will enable your organization to move freely and easily between platforms and apps if necessary. 
   
   
5. Data Security: Cloud provides a simple and efficient vector for ensuring patching is enforced. Additionally, cloud deployments alleviate company resources when it comes to securing SaaS applications rather than hosting your own solutions.
   
   
6. Boost Uptime: Eliminating the single points of failure means more accessible time to your cloud-hosted service for your organization’s end-users.
   
   
7. Reduce Hardware Complications: With IT infrastructures built outside the cloud, you’re more prone to issues with your existing hardware.
   
   
8. Less Maintenance: This goes without saying. Moving to the cloud, by far, will save your IT teams hundreds of hours spent dealing with maintenance on clunky hardware and routine maintenance.
   
   
9. Quicker Implementation: Roll in the goods! One of the known benefits of cloud infrastructure is the breeze of implementation. In no time, your cloud infrastructure will be up and running securely. Obviously, this all depends on your team bandwidth to fully migrate, but on average, it should take anywhere between 30-60 days (Depending on the size of the organization).
10. Easier Automation: With a cloud infrastructure, it becomes easier for you to automate tasks for your organization. Some of these include workload management, application development & testing, and much more. With tools like AWS Cloudformation, AWS Elastic Beanstalk & Terraform, you could easily automate tasks within your infrastructure and save your team on time-wasted tasks. 
    
    
11. Storage Enhancement: Similar to the ability to scale, migrating allows your storage to enable a new layer of features. From Disaster Recovery to quickly being able to share your data. Also, overall accessibility and usability improvements for your storage.
    
    
12. Collaboration From Your Team From Wherever: As the title says, unlock the ability to work alongside your team from remotely anywhere. Although you don’t need a cloud infrastructure to enable your organization’s remote capabilities, it does allow your IT team to limit access control, identify vulnerabilities in hosts, and detect and remediate anomalous user activities for remote employees.
    
    
13. Disaster Recovery: Remember when your organization needed a backup plan in case your organization’s data was at risk? That’s long gone with a cloud infrastructure. The cloud connection makes your network’s assets available to your organization’s users 24/7.

Cons

1. Organizational Downtime: Cloud can’t always exceed expectations. There is the occasional and, shall we say, very spread-out update that rarely affects your organization’s uptime. Cloud providers are notoriously known to address and resolve any outages in the cloud within an instance. 
2. Security in The Cloud: Migration to the cloud does not translate into an easy way to network security. Although protocols can differ, cloud security remains vulnerable to threats if not properly secured during migration.
3. Unforeseen initial migration pains: Always expect some sort of hiccups to occur when migrating your existing infrastructure to the cloud. Each organization’s infrastructure is different and may require different levels of access and caveats that can delay the migration over to the cloud.
4. Time and Investment on Cloud Migration: Although less capital investment than regular on-premise firewalls and data storage, the investment to migrate to the cloud can still scale a large bill initially and include costs for migrations if your team is not handling the migration internally.

Should My Organization Migrate to The Cloud?

Our time and discipline in cybersecurity have allowed us to gain expertise across different security providers and understand customer issues. Whether your business has ten or ten thousand users, we’ve brought it upon ourselves to relay cloud security and/or migration to the cloud, the most effective way for organizations to scale, reduce costs, introduce automation, and much more. 

With the benefits of cloud computing, for your organization, there may still lie vulnerabilities that even cloud security can’t solve, like lack of qualified staff, compliance & setting consistent security policies. When considering migrating your existing infrastructure to the cloud, these all play factors, and will your organization be ready to polish its vulnerabilities before migration? 

The CQ-Checklist for A Successful Cloud Migration

We all know migrations are never fun. They require tons of work from your IT teams and often require assistance from multiple departments. To effectively migrate your infrastructure to the cloud, we’ve created our cloud migration checklist for you and your organization. We’ve filled it with some best tips and practices to ensure a successful migration. 

RELATED CONTENT: HOW TO OVERCOME CLOUD SECURITY CHALLENGES

• Rehosting
• Otherwise known as “life-and-shift,” Rehosting is often referred to as safe and cost-effective modernization. This portion of migration is key to unlocking value within your organization's integral systems.
  
  
• Replatforming
• Known to be the “life-tinker-and-shift,” it involves upgrading an application from its existing platform and then adhering to the minimum possible factors to get it up and running in the cloud.
  
  
• Repurchasing
• Simply means you're moving to another SaaS platform or provider.
  
  
• Refactoring/Re-Architecting
• Reimagining how the infrastructure is architected and currently deployed using the new cloud platforms native features or tools.
  
  
• Retire
• Out with the old and in with the new. Your organization can often save somewhere up to 20% of its IT portfolio when no longer in use. These cut-offs can be beneficial to your organization as well as save your organization thousands.
  
  
• Retain
• Ride the wave on your current database solution. Maybe your team is not ready to migrate all at once. Migrate what makes the most sense for your organization.
  
  

1.  Be Clear on Your Goal & Needs: Identify what it is that your organization is looking to gain when migrating over to the cloud. Although it is easy to add virtual machines to your environment when you are cloud-based, it can quickly rack up and cost your organization thousands of dollars. Don’t be scared to scratch off a few items your organization isn’t maximizing currently, which will cost you to migrate to the cloud.
   
   
2. Anticipate New Challenges In Security: Within anything in IT or database management, you should always be ready for new challenges. Primarily at the beginning of your migration, you might run into configuration issues that require you or your team to dedicate some of its resources to configure correctly.
   
   
3. Consider Consolidating Applications: Not to say that you shouldn’t upload all your applications to the cloud but consider migrating the businesses’ core applications and data sets first and then the remaining non-crucial business applications.
   
   
4. Focus On One Cloud Solution at A Time: With many options for cloud-based servers, you might want to double-dip into a few and see which you enjoy more. DON’T. Do your research prior, test it out, and commit to one cloud solution. Without proper guidance or even a lack of in-depth team and experience in the cloud, cloud migrations can be complicated, and including more than one cloud solution can make things all the more complicated.
   
   
5. Decide What Data Requires Protection: Moving to the cloud is one thing, but securing the cloud will fall directly into your IT team’s hands. Ensure your team is aware that not all data will move immediately to the cloud and require your team to protect that data, whether you are migrating immediately or keeping it within your prior infrastructure.
   
   
6. Include All Necessary Departments: Lastly, make sure to involve the necessary department executives or data managers to ensure all moved data is in accord with your migration schedule. Each department head can be aware of what transfers to the cloud.

Contact Us Today and See How We Can Assist your Organization with Its Cloud Security Concerns

We realize you have many options when it comes to cloud migrations. Whether you need assistance migrating to the cloud or seeing which cloud product will best serve your organization, we’re here to help. Contact us today and speak with one of our cloud experts.