Today, most companies opt to store most of their data in the cloud. However, keeping the data secure becomes a challenge to most enterprises as the data increases. This increase in data makes enterprises appreciate cloud migration more.
Cloud migration refers to moving applications, data, or other elements to a cloud computing environment. You can experience some challenges during cloud migration s, such as misconfiguration or data loss, leading to a data breach. Therefore, you need to incorporate various security measures to ensure that your data are safe during cloud migration. Some companies offer successful cloud migration processes like AWS backup and unifying data protection.
The outline below takes you through some tips on how you can ensure security during cloud migration:
- Assess Your Current Data
It’s easy to overlook the data you have across several databases. Without appropriate evaluation and categorization, you might be storing meaningless organizational data for years. Thus, you need to assess your current data before conducting your data migration.
You can lose valuable data if you don’t conduct your data migration properly. Hence, you have to classify your current data by separating the ones to store and those you should dispose of right away. This classification ensures that you don’t discard your important data or store useless ones. Moreover, this move is essential to ease data tracking.
You can use several data management tools to help you conduct data inventory and avoid data hoarding. These are crucial because holding on to unnecessary data can increase the company’s liability when a security breach occurs. You can contact a data migration consultant to help you select a reliable and safe data migration plan.
- Consider A Phased Migration
You can enhance the security of your cloud migration by conducting it in phases. A phased migration allows your team members to familiarize themselves with cloud systems. You can start your data migration by moving the low-priority information to control the risk. Then, transfer the critical or confidential data after testing your configuration and singling out the security gaps and bugs.
In fact, a Cloud migration service must be performed by partnering with an expert Cloud migration company that can also help in the process of data center decommissioning, ITAD services, IT asset disposition, reverse logistics and IT asset buyback, before fully migrating to Cloud-based data storage. Here, a company like “Dataknox” can be a perfect choice, which helps in the phased migration of your critical data assets.
Additionally, conducting a phased migration helps encourage slower user onboarding and minimal time pressure. With the slow pace of the phased migration, you can avoid errors like granting unnecessary authorization to unqualified team members or deleting or duplicating data.
- Know The Data Compliance Regime
It’s critical to understand the compliance requirements that might be in place before performing your cloud migration. These vary from organization to organization and can help prevent data leaks. So, it’s crucial to determine the backup, encryption, storage, and data transfer requirements when conducting your cloud migration.
Governing bodies have put strict regulations to safeguard stored data adequately in industries like e-commerce, healthcare, and finance.
For instance, a financial company operating in the United States has to comply with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Gram-Leach-Bliley-Act to deal with sensitive client data. Meanwhile, a healthcare company needs to conform to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
- Encrypt Your Transit Data
Data encryption is one of the strategies for protecting data from cybercrime. Therefore, it’s crucial to encrypt your data when conducting your cloud migration. Data in transit are highly vulnerable to abuse with exposure to the internet. You can use network security controls and encrypted transport network protocols such as hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) to protect your data.
You can use transfer appliances for large data migrations, like through your cloud vendor or a third party. It’s also vital to encrypt the data and the device with the data before they leave your facility to guarantee maximum data security.
- Manage Deduplication And Access Control
Most organizations manage their data by giving their team members the least privileges. This means that the end-users can only access the specific data they require for the job. With data migration sensitivities, it’s crucial to give data access only to authorized personnel on an as-needed basis. After the cloud migration, you can then grant access to the data end-users to do their job. You can also implement two-factor authentication for maximum data security.
Deduplication, or deduping, is a method of shrinking the volume of data for cloud migration and helps compress the needed footprint of the new data storage. By shrinking the volume of data set out for migration, you lessen the data migration costs and improve the security of your data.
- Assess The Impact On The Remaining Data Center And Drives
It’s essential to keep tabs on the physical devices like storage servers and drives you leave behind in your data center after the data migration. Have a robust plan on what to do with the storage equipment, regardless of whether you do a partial or complete data center decommissioning.
You need to decide if you’ll reuse or break down the equipment and re-market it after the cloud migration. You also need to understand how your service provider plans to maintain secure custody of the storage equipment during the decommissioning process.
Wiping the retiring drives is also part of the decommissioning activities. You must be careful not to remove critical data when wiping your data drives. For the best outcomes, hiring an IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) firm to help you perform the data wipe is vital. The ITAD firm documents all the activities they conduct, including data destruction and drive sanitization, facilitating the security of your data after migration.
- Understand Your Cloud’s Security
It’s crucial to reassess the security of your cloud and its gaps after cloud migration. This reassessment entails gaining knowledge of all the new entitlement and access conditions.
Clouds can be fast and safe, but they also have vulnerabilities. Therefore, it would be wise to look out for any potential risks, implement the essential security measures, and install all necessary patches to guarantee maximum cloud security.
Takeaway
The type of cloud migration you choose, the steps you take during the migration, and the provider you work with determine the security of your data. Hence, regular monitoring of your systems to ensure the safety of your data is essential.
