Why Faster Is Possible In Cloud Migration

Embracing the new wave of digital transformation is not always a quick process in cybersecurity. While the complexity of the move will always dictate the timeline of cloud migration to some degree, concerns over security and systemic problems can lead to questions and setbacks.

Let’s take a look at some of the roadblocks that cause businesses to delay or completely stop their migration efforts, and then explore how new strides in cloud traffic visibility can help organizations overcome these challenges.

Cloud Migration: What's Holding Organizations Back?

When IT teams are used to running applications on-premise, there’s a natural concern as to how these applications will perform in a new environment. And there's a good reason for that: many of these applications are based on older software and workflows that may respond differently in the agile cloud environment than they did on-premise. 

In the event that lag time or bugs do occur post-migration, the customer experience suffers and so does the business’s bottom line.

Security is also a major point of debate around the topic of cloud migration. As large amounts of confidential data are moved from on-premise data centers to the cloud, the paradigm of how a business protects its data also shifts. Along with upending how organizations detect and respond to familiar threats such as data breaches, the cloud also presents a host of unique risks.

With the need to learn new skills and best practices that apply to cloud security, IT teams often fear that they won’t have the internal bandwidth or oversight to properly secure business data as it migrates and prevent unwanted exposure.

Remove Obstacles with Cloud Traffic Visibility

Fortunately, when it comes to cloud migration, faster is possible. By taking advantage of new technologies like the virtual network taps announced over the past year by major cloud providers including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, organizations can access the same depth and rate of network data in the cloud as they can on-prem. 

Before and during their migration to the cloud, organizations must gather information about all the assets in their infrastructure, as well as the dependencies between them, and monitor those assets for any potential performance impacts. 

Maintaining an always-on map of what actually exists in a dynamic environment is difficult from the start, made more so by already-strapped security and IT resources struggling with a whole new set of cloud-specific risks, workflows, and visibility gaps.

Once you add real-time cloud traffic visibility to security and IT operations, many of these roadblocks go away. IT teams gain insight into every asset, device, and user operating in the environment, and security teams gain the deep, always-on visibility they need to support a migration without introducing too much risk for comfort.

Unlike technologies that base their insights on agents or logs, security and IT solutions based on wire data—or the communications on the network itself—capture every transaction as it happens, automatically. This allows security and IT teams to dramatically reduce the amount of manual labor required to sift through the noise of incomplete datasets and consequently low-fidelity alerts, as well as friction over data silos that typically grow worse in the cloud.

Security Benefits Beyond Migration

Along with helping organizations to ensure the secure, efficient movement of data and applications, cloud traffic visibility has significant and long term security benefits once a migration is complete:

1. Empiricism of information. Because wire data is observed, not self-reported, there’s no way for attackers to turn off or modify the data organizations receive. 
2. Signal-to-noise ratio. Going directly to real-time cloud communications allows for clean, consistent data that can, with advanced machine learning capabilities, be correlated and contextualized. This helps organizations act quickly and with the agility demanded by the cloud.
3. Breadth. Wire data captures deep information about infrastructure elements that can’t otherwise be easily monitored, such as IoT devices.

The path to cloud migration doesn’t have to be filled with fear and uncertainty. With complete visibility into cloud traffic made possible by the emerging technology category of network detection and response (NDR), businesses will be equipped to drive fast, confident migrations and operate in the cloud with the same confidence as they do on-premise.

To learn more about the value of cloud traffic visibility for migration and security, download a free copy of the eBook, Network Detection and Response: Cloud Security’s Missing Link.