Moving into the cloud is becoming necessary for most businesses, regardless of size. Cloud integrations and functionality mean it’s hard to maintain an on-premise-only state in the business world.
But migrating successfully to the cloud requires a clear and well-defined strategy. Without planning, it could be a disaster.
In partnership with WatServ, we’ve compiled a list of three steps to help you build your cloud migration strategy, setting you up for long-term success.
Adjust Company Policies Before Starting
Your company policies and procedures should already be reviewed regularly as part of your business processes, but adopting a cloud infrastructure throws them all into question.
The policies and procedures written for your company are based on your previous infrastructure – likely on-premise assets. These policies, therefore, won’t cover your new cloud migration infrastructure as well as you need them to.
Before starting your migrations, review your policies and procedures with key stakeholders and department heads. Speaking to them and ensuring you have all critical processes covered will be crucial to your documentation redraft. It’s also essential to make sure you consider compliance before your review.
Data Classification
If you still need to classify your data, you’ll need to do this well before any cloud migration, as it will be a crucial component of your cloud migration strategy.
You have a responsibility to care for and protect the data of your customers and suppliers. You can ensure your business information is safe by defining what your data is and how your employees should handle it. Data classification is the key to most security initiatives and should be implemented in businesses of all sizes.
Once your data is classified, you can use the parameters to prioritize which data is safe to migrate first and define what protections should be in place. For data protection and compliance reasons, the most sensitive information must be secure and protected.
Define Responsibilities
Before you put pen to paper to write your strategy, you need to define who and what will be responsible for data at each stage of the process, including the cloud provider you will be using to host your data.
Most cloud providers follow the Shared Responsibility Model, meaning they take on some responsibility for securing and protecting your data. However, it is essential to review and see what responsibilities they see as your responsibility.
Internally, department heads, security architects, and cloud implementation teams will all have a hand in the migration process. Make it clear who is responsible for what roles before you start migrating and that they know their role.
For example, department heads will be responsible for ensuring their data is classified correctly and the plan includes all of their current data points. The security architects will be responsible for ensuring the same, if not more protection, is applied to the new storage location. And the cloud implementation team is responsible for ensuring the migration is completed securely with no data loss.
With these steps, your cloud migration strategy is more likely to succeed.
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