When you move to the cloud, there are trade-offs. You relieve operational burdens but most likely entrust security to an outside party/parties and your teams might lose some visibility and functionality. It’s a mindset shift that requires thoughtful planning to maintain a robust security and operations profile.
Let’s outline a couple of steps to take before you make the move and what security concerns to consider as part of the migration.
Should you move to the cloud?
Cloud providers target executives with promises of considerable cost savings. But not every business function is suited to cloud migration. You need a holistic assessment of your environment that considers migration from multiple perspectives.
The evaluation should cover identifying risk areas, and defining compliance requirements, cost restraints, and business goals. Does it make financial sense to migrate? Which applications need kid-glove treatment as you migrate? And how will shifting to the cloud impact your current levels of control and visibility?
Another consideration is that certain on-premises tools and processes might not translate to a cloud environment. This is a particular problem in the area of control and visibility. For example, in a cloud environment, you might end up with too many super administrators, or there is a failure to shut off access to a stray SaaS application when an employee leaves.
Make security a top priority in cloud migration
Visibility is the first step to security. You’ll want to address gaps in visibility and functionality in the on-premises to cloud migration and maintain a complete view of your cloud environment from build time to run time through every migration stage.
You’ll also want to do this without setting off false alerts that could trigger a pattern of complacency in dealing with all alerts.
Your migration support team should be working with a purpose-built security tool for securing dynamic cloud workloads. Existing on-prem tools aren’t suitable for the cloud. The ideal security tool should provide expert-level assistance without the need to hire cloud security experts. To learn more about cloud security tools, watch this webinar.
What we look for in security tools
There are a couple of crucial requirements for cloud-suitable security tools. Cost and simplicity are essential. But tools that leverage AI to work more accurately are also important, as is automation. In addition, you’ll want tools that operate together to create a unified platform. Let’s take a deeper dive:
- Look for a central security platform
Disparate point solutions, even when best-in-breed, are complex to manage, especially if your organization is considering using more than one cloud. Ditch siloed tools and look for a platform that provides a comprehensive view of risk across multiple cloud platforms for every tenant in your organization. You’ll also want automation for critical tasks, including security posture management, compliance monitoring, vulnerability management, runtime monitoring, file integrity monitoring, and intrusion detection.
- Consider platforms that use AI to reduce false alerts
Rules-based security is the de-facto standard, but it spits out false alerts at a high rate. Consider a platform that can ingest and analyze security log data and apply behavior-based learnings that establish norms and patterns based on your current environmental data. This adaptive approach allows you to detect anomalies with greater speed and accuracy. This can reduce false alerts by up to 30%.
- Think about reducing SIEM costs
If your platform can isolate relevant data, you can decrease your SIEM operating costs. A behavior-based learning platform can help because it feeds only actionable data to SIEM for analysis. This reduces the total amount of data ingested, potentially saving thousands of dollars in ingestion costs. This is a particularly critical feature if the cloud you are migrating to has ingress and egress charges.
Tego offers a Cloud Readiness Assessment that incorporates security concerns along with comprehensive application and infrastructure discovery, application dependency mapping, data-driven optimization suggestions, and recommended migration strategies. Contact us today to learn more.