Top Tips for Effective Risk Management When Migrating Data to the Cloud

Trusting their most sensitive and valuable data with cloud services can be a difficult task for most organizations. This is especially true when organizations have already invested a significant chunk in building and maintaining their on premise infrastructure. Some organizations end up making the mistake of trying to replicate their on premise infrastructure in the cloud. But the number one area where things could go wrong for organizations is in the migration of sensitive data to the cloud. This is why it’s incredibly important for organizations to have a detailed and meticulous plan for cloud migration of data. It might also be a good idea for organizations to enlist the services of cloud migration experts such as Cloud Services Sacramento. In this article we will try to cover all the important facets building an effective data migration plan for the cloud.

In order to build a cloud data migration plan from scratch, companies need to identify the data that they want to move to the cloud, the process through which the data should be moved, know the destination of the data and have a strong access policy in place in order to access the data. Once all this is determined, companies should start filling in the details of the data migration plan with a step-by-step plan. The plan should take into account the uses that might be affected by the process, the scope of downtime involved (if any), and even potential technical or compatibility issues. Well thought-out data plans also take into stock how to maintain data security and integrity during the migration process.

The data being migrated should be understood fully by the teams that are responsible for migrating the data. The team should be clear on what kind of data they are dealing with, any specific storage or processing requirements associated with it (such as highly regulated health data), if the data requires specific access management, and all other necessary security and access controls. End-user data stores must be equipped with the right access controls and auditing necessary.

A full data clean-up before migration can truly help organizations have better control over their data. This means extracting, transforming and duplicating data before the actual data migration can take place. This is critical for organizations to know that they are actually migrating the right data that they need and securing it properly. Keep in mind that once the migration takes place, the data is probably going to stay in the same state until the next migration.

Companies need to have a strong policy framework in place for data migration. This is necessary to ensure the security and integrity of the data and to check that the data is actually moving to the right place. These policies can be easily automated to ensure a higher degree of security for the data at the destination. For more information on building secure policy frameworks for data migration, please refer to IT Support Sacramento.

Once the data is migrated, companies need to ensure that the migrated data is placed where it should be. In order to cross check this in detail, it is a good idea for companies to back up all their old systems so they can cross-verify if any files are missing. The people in charge of the migration process should also work to deploy an automatic retention policy and ensure that the access and permission controls are all working as intended.    Make sure everything’s where it should be, create an automatic retention policy, clean up stale data and double-check permissions.

This is a step many companies tend to overlook (until it’s late). But auditing and documenting the entire migration process can be incredibly helpful in terms of audit and compliance initiatives.

Cloud data centers and traditional, on premise infrastructure often tend not to play well with each other as they are not connected. This can be problematic for seamless data migrations. Companies should consider deploying a secure IPsec tunnel. This can help establish a secure interconnected environment, essentially a larger infrastructure network that solves all connectivity problems. This sort of infrastructure allows companies to easily connect to the back-end local services and applications in local environments without compromising their privacy.

Making use of cloud-native tools can further ease the process of securing data on the cloud. These tools and services that can ensure secure migration of data from on-premise to the cloud infrastructure are available in some cloud environments. These tools are also capable of creating file backups, tape backups, etc. For more information on effective risk management during data migration, please check out Managed IT Services Chico.

Data filtering rules are necessary and should be applied on border gateways. This allows access to a set of resources, without compromising the privacy of other restricted resources with sensitive information.

This is critical for companies undertaking data migration in order to ensure the privacy and security of the data being migrated. Regardless of server location, this service enables the use of agents on each system that needs to be backed up across the infrastructure for secure data backups. This enables even individual servers within the on-premise IT network to perform regular backups of all other remote systems.