Cloud offers a plethora of benefits to enterprises in terms of cost and performance efficiency. However, migrating to the cloud isn’t an easy decision as it poses many threats to the data. While migrating to the cloud, data is vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Hence, cloud migration exercise needs to be carefully planned and executed.
Below mentioned are a few security measures that enterprises can undertake to secure their data while migrating to the cloud.
Understand Your Data – The first step is to know the data that would be moved. It includes understanding the data – its usage, storage, and retention policies.
Consider a Phased Migration – When cloud migration is done in phases, it gives time to various teams to get acquainted with cloud systems. It is advisable to begin the phased migration with moving the low-priority data to test configurations and identifying any security lapses before migrating the critical business data. This also enables enterprises to meticulously plan the entire migration process to avoid errors that may compromise data security or provide unauthorized access to any third-party.
Secure Your APIs – Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) act as communication channels between environments. Hence, they are a prime target of cyber criminals. It is essential to secure APIs at all stages of the cloud migration process.
Back up Your Data – When data is being moved from one company server to another, there’s always an inherent risk that some of it might get lost in transit. Hence, it becomes extremely important to back up the data.
Encrypt Your Data During Transit – One effective way to secure the data that is in transit is to encrypt it. Data encryption creates an additional layer of security. Enterprises must also ensure that they securely store any encryption keys and credentials, and also take regular back up of the data.
Insider Threats – In addition to external security threats such as ransom or phishing attacks, security threats can also arise from within the organization. These are called insider threats and they can emerge in the form of espionage, sabotage, theft or innocent human errors. Regardless of whether they have malicious intentions or not, these threats can cause grave financial or reputational loss to enterprises. Hence, enterprises need to establish a strong threat model, wherein they focus on detecting and remediating insider threats and security breaches.
Conclusion:
When enterprises move their workloads to the cloud, they need to know that ensuring security of their systems and data is a shared responsibility between them and their cloud service provider. Hence, it is crucial to routinely monitor systems and ensure data hygiene. Without a data security plan while migrating to the cloud, enterprises can fall victim to cyber-attacks. Hence, enterprises can follow some of the aforementioned tips to ensure security of data throughout the cloud migration process.
