What is cloud migration?
Cloud migration, in its simplest form, refers to the process of moving digital assets, such as data, applications, and IT resources, from on-premises infrastructure or legacy systems to cloud computing environments. There are various flavours of migration and utilization, but according to a survey conducted by IBM, one of the most common is the 'Hybrid' approach, with around 77% of businesses adopting a hybrid cloud approach.
There are three key components of a hybrid cloud migration model:
- On-Premises (On-Prem): Physical location with some amount of hardware and networking, traditionally a data centre.
- Public Cloud: Third-party providers like AWS, Azure, and Google, who offer multiple services such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
- Private Cloud: A cloud computing environment where resources are isolated for one customer.
Why does cloud migration matter for enterprises?
Cloud adoption provides many benefits to businesses, including:
- Scalability: Cloud environments allow enterprises to scale resources up or down based on demand, enabling them to quickly adapt to changing business requirements.
- Flexibility and Agility: Cloud platforms provide greater flexibility and agility, enabling enterprises to innovate and deploy new services more rapidly compared to traditional on-premises infrastructure.
- Cost Efficiency: Pay-as-you-go model, allowing enterprises to reduce capital expenditures on hardware and infrastructure.
- Enhanced Security: Cloud service providers invest heavily in security measures to protect data and infrastructure, offering advanced security features and compliance certifications.
The combination of these benefits provides significant potential for businesses to innovate and move quickly, ultimately allowing them to be flexible and adapt to changing market conditions, customer demands, and technological advancements with greater agility and efficiency.
Cloud migration strategy
There are multiple migration strategies a business can adopt, including:
- Rehosting (Lift-and-shift): Quickly completed but may lead to increased costs for running workloads.
- Refactoring (Cloud Native): Designed specifically for the cloud but requires a steep learning curve and staff training on new processes.
- Hybrid Cloud: Mix of on-premises and public cloud use, offering flexibility and scalability while keeping data secure on-premises. This can introduce complexities in setup and management overhead and requires ensuring security and compliance in both environments.
It is important to note that each strategy has its trade-offs and there is no single gold standard for a one size fits all cloud migration strategy. Different businesses will prioritize and leverage different benefits, for instance while some might prefer a rehosting strategy as it gets them migrated the fastest, it typically ends up also being the most costly strategy as “lift-and-shift” doesn’t take advantage of many key benefits that the cloud has to offer. Conversely, refactoring is a strategy optimized at making the most of the benefits that cloud providers have to offer, however the process of redesigning applications requires cloud expertise and based on the scale of applications that are required to be refactored this strategy might not be the quickest when it comes to moving applications from being hosted on premise to in the cloud.
Phases of a cloud migration
At the highest level, there are four main steps in a successful migration:
- Discover: Identify and categorize IT assets, applications, and critical dependencies.
- Plan: Develop a detailed migration plan, including timelines, resource allocation, and risk management strategies.
- Migrate: Execute the migration plan, minimizing disruption to business operations.
- Optimize: Continuously optimize the cloud environment using automation, performance monitoring, and cost management tools to improve efficiency, performance, and scalability.
While it is natural to race towards the end goals of a cloud migration, most successful cloud migration strategies allocate the appropriate timelines to each phase.
The “Discover” phase specifically is where most businesses can set themselves up for success. Having a complete understanding of assets, applications, services, and dependencies needed to migrate however is much easier said than done. Given the pace of change and how laborious of a task inventorying everything can be to manage and maintain, most mistakes at this stage will propagate and amplify through the migration journey.
Risks and challenges of cloud migration
Though cloud migration offers a wealth of benefits, it also introduces new risks that need to be accounted for and managed effectively. Security should be considered a fundamental part of the process, not an additional measure that can be ‘bolted’ on at the end.
Let’s consider the most popular migration strategy, using a ‘Hybrid Cloud’. A recent report by the industry analyst group Forrester cited that Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools are just one facet of security, stating:
"No matter how good it is, using a CSPM solution alone will not provide you with full visibility, detection, and effective remediation capabilities for all threats. Your adversaries are also targeting operating systems, existing on-prem network infrastructure, and applications in their quest to steal valuable data".
Unpacking some of the risks here, it’s clear they fall into a range of categories, including:
- Security Concerns: Ensuring security across both on-premises and cloud environments, addressing potential misconfigurations and vulnerabilities.
- Contextual Understanding: Effective security requires a deep understanding of the organization's business processes and the context in which data and applications operate.
- Threat Detection and Response: Identifying and responding to threats in real-time requires advanced capabilities such as AI and anomaly detection.
- Platform Approach: Deploying integrated security solutions that provide end-to-end visibility, centralized management, and automated responses across hybrid infrastructure.
Since the cloud doesn’t operate in a vacuum, businesses will always have a myriad of 3rd party applications, users, endpoints, external services, and partners connecting and interacting with their cloud environments. From this perspective, being able to correlate and understand behaviors and activity both within the cloud and its surroundings becomes imperative.
It then follows that context from a business wide perspective is necessary. This has two distinct implications, the first is application or workload specific context (i.e. where do the assets, services, and functions alerted on reside within the cloud application) and the second is business wide context. Given the volume of alerts that security practitioners need to manage, findings that lack the appropriate context to fully understand and resolve the issue create additional strain on teams that are already managing a difficult challenge.
Conclusion
With that in mind, Darktrace’s approach to security, with its existing and new advances in Cloud Detection and Response capabilities, anomaly detection across SaaS applications, and native ability to leverage many AI techniques to understand the business context within your dynamic cloud environment and on-premises infrastructure. It provides you with the integrated building blocks to provide the ‘360’ degree view required to detect and respond to threats before, during, and long after your enterprise migrates to the cloud.
References
IBM Transformation Index: State of Cloud https://www.ibm.com/blog/hybrid-cloud-use-cases/
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