Cloud Migration: Security and risk management challenges before transitioning to the cloud.
Migrating to the cloud should be a well-thought-out decision. Often businesses lose sight of security protocols in the process.
The work-from-home approach during the pandemic highlighted the benefits of cloud-based services, however, businesses have realized how the security towards decentralized employees can swiftly turn into a headache.
With the increasing number of phishing emails and ransomware threats reported during the Coronavirus pandemic, companies are looking for support with their existing tools to repel cyberattacks and keep their employees and their assets secure.
With more cybersecurity professionals working from home, the speed at which cloud security tools need to be adopted is only going to get faster.
A survey was conducted among 130 security experts in the Cloud and Security Expo in London to gather data on migration speed of tools to the cloud. Over 50% of the responses said they moved to cloud-based security tools in 2018, 18% moved in 2019, only 3% were planning to do it in 2020 and 13% did not migrate at all. The rest of the answers did not know if they were going to migrate. Among those who migrated, 30% of them said that more than half of their security tools were running in the cloud now, whereas the rest said that at least 25% of their security tools were migrated.
That survey also showed that 22% of the experts said migrating to the cloud was not a priority for their business. Almost a third of the audience said they did not know what their business concerns were about migrating security tools to the cloud.
Finally, 44% of the security experts that filled the survey said they preferred to migrate their legacy products to the cloud, while 52% preferred to replace legacy with cloud-native security tools. About a third of the responses showed that migrating security tools to the cloud was either too difficult or too risky.
So as a business, if you are contemplating migrating to cloud, here are some points to ponder.
Benefits of using cloud security tools in the cloud
o Thorough monitoring of attacks
o Reduced maintenance
o Reduced investment
o Faster value-creation time
o Access to dynamic features
Pain points during the transition
o Data protection
o Unauthorized access
o Server failures
o Data control
As far as data types in the cloud are concerned, the most secure are emails, customer information, financial information, file sharing, and personnel information.
The amount of data to be protected in the cloud increased significantly over the last year due to the ever-increasing number of employees working remotely. Therefore, it is only a matter of time before cybersecurity professionals rely more on cloud tools to protect this data.
A huge hike in the transition to the cloud is expected even post the COVID-19 pandemic. However, up to 75% of the workload is still carried out on-premise. Data is not transferred to the cloud overnight and that’s why the cybersecurity team must continue to secure the surface of the growing attack.
As more and more data are migrated to the cloud, the immediate challenge for cybersecurity experts is to find ways to protect all this data before cybercriminals try to reach out to it. To achieve this goal, early access to cloud-hosted tools is vital.
