Protecting Your Legacy Data in the Great Migration to the Cloud

For a lot of companies worldwide, it’s no more a matter of “if” they will transfer to the cloud but rather “exactly what” they will put in the cloud. Keeping everything on-premises within the walls of an organization is unrealistic. Cloud is progressively a part of a growing number of IT business methods, a minimum of evaluating by the quick spending on cloud-related services. According to a recent IDC research, public cloud services spending will reach $98 billion USD in 2016, with a material annual growth rate 5 times that of the IT industry overall.

 

Why? Business are constantly searching for means to do even more, to collaborate better, to produce even more product, to continue pushing the income needle forward– all the while, enabling a progressively worldwide labor force. Cloud computing provides numerous advantages to technology suppliers and their clients, permitting business to invest far less in infrastructure and resources that they should host, manage, administer and maintain internally. This instead allows them to invest in the advanced applications they build on an externally hosted and fully redundant environment that they can access at a fraction of the cost – not just for saving costs on what is typically capital expenditures on hardware, but more so for business agility. The business landscape has never been more competitive, and every enterprise is looking for an edge. Judging by the numbers, many believe utilizing the cloud to manage enterprise systems and content with repositories such as Microsoft SharePoint Online will help pave their method to victory.

 

With this great reward, however, comes great risk. Hosting SharePoint through Microsoft Office 365 could reduce cost and improve global access to content. However, for organizations subject to regulatory requirements (which’s basically every organization today regardless of size, vertical, or geography), the move to the cloud isn’t without risk. Enterprises have significant concerns about storing business data outside their own walls because it means relinquishing control– control of information, user access, authentication, and data exposure (whether intentional or accidental) of sensitive personally identifiable information, classified information, or otherwise non-compliant content.

 

So you accidentally let someone take a peek at the wrong data– how much harm can that data breach possibly do? About $5.4 million USD worth, according to a recent study by Ponemon. The study found that the average organizational cost for a single breached record– a document, user ID, email, email address– is $188 USD. Think about the number of emails clogging up your own inbox, and documents in your shared drive today … it includes up very, extremely quickly.

 

Before you call your sales representative selling you a cloud platform and tell her no thanks, consider this: There is a way to gain value from cloud computing while addressing compliance issues. Numerous companies are offloading select content or workloads into the cloud, and keeping their most regulated material on-premises. You won’t be alone. Many organizations are following this approach, as IDC found that 80 percent of the world’s 2,000 largest companies will still have greater than 50 percent of their IT onsite by 2020.

 

So, what’s your move to begin the migration from your old on-premises technology platforms to the cloud? Right here’s your four-step playbook:.

 

Examine Existing Sites and Content. Recognize at-risk content and delicate data within your “as is” on premises environments– including SharePoint or file share content– that might potentially violate your compliance policy. Perform a risk analysis to understand exposure levels for a defined scope of content, as well as the efficiency of existing controls to determine the overall sensitivity of an existing SharePoint environment.

 

Report on and Classify Content. Implement an effective and reasonable compliance program that can be enforced, measured and modified as required. Identify what data your organization collects, processes and establishments (and where it comes from) and choose applicable/mandatory privacy and security requirements– what, where, why, and how. Provide information category based on risk exposure to the organization. Define minimum content and physical security access controls based on threat classification. Assign metadata and restrict access to delicate content.

 

Design compliance information architecture. This is your chance to expose, access, and handle all content residing in your network and/or the cloud for centralized file management in SharePoint based on your specific business requirements– such as restructuring consents, and adjusting access, metadata and security settings of content. Strictly regulate user-generated material to avoid the creation or uploading of non-compliant, dangerous material.

 

Determine cloud migration approach. Make use of content and website evaluation reports and succeeding tagging to establish a finest practices approach to migrate select content and workloads to the cloud. You can do so by identifying cloud-appropriate content for migration with customizable filters based on metadata or content types you established in Step 3. Scan, flag and/or block all contents prior to upload to ensure compliance. Detect and make modifications to content and/or user consents and access that violate your policy. Then, just as in any other migration– determine your schedule and project milestones to ensure that the project meets your business needs and keeps your end users concentrated on exactly what they ought to be focused on: doing their tasks.

 

As business and government agencies move their applications increasingly to a cloud based infrastructure, they must also understand and fully review the associated privacy and security considerations. Privacy is a global issue, and one thing is certain, even if you build software applications to serve a very specific market segment – you can not ignore privacy as a fundamental issue that your customers will demand. Change can be hard, but this is a positive change. You’ll be utilizing a new way of working in the cloud that can vastly improve your business agility, while keeping traditional hardware costs low and safeguarding your sensitive data. In the meantime, keep your feet firmly grown on the ground as your applications move to the sky!

 

GeoViz has a history of serving enterprises to move to the next level of operational excellence focusing people, processes, infrastructure, and technology. We deliver, complex software development projects, Team Augmentations(co-sourcing), Business Intelligence, Retails Management, CRM, & Internet Technology solutions. GeoViz serves client inside North America specifically USA and Canada. We have physically served clients in the cities of Seattle, Toronto, Buffalo, Ottawa, Monreal, Hamilton, London, Kitchener, Windsor, Detroit. Feel free to contact us or Drop us a note for any help or assistance.

 

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