The pace of cloud adoption continues to accelerate as businesses reap the benefits of speed, flexibility, and lower costs. In fact, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC), the GCC public cloud market is expected to reach approximately US$2.3 billion, growing more than double in value by 2024.
While IT departments initially pushed for a migration to the cloud, the C-suite has come to realise the many positive effects of cloud platforms: accelerating business innovation, transforming business functions, enhancing communication and collaboration, and increasing productivity.
Migration to the cloud may appear to be an easy, one-time task to some. However, this is far from true. It’s essential to have a plan in place from the beginning to deal with the complicated concerns associated with cloud adoption. Unforeseen costs, lack of scalability and availability, insufficient security measures, and compliance violations are all factors that can cause corporate stakeholder’s concern.
Since cloud requirements are so intertwined with other business operations and goals, each organisation’s path to the cloud is unique. Some companies begin with a well-thought-out strategy, while others respond to a business requirement or an emergency, such as the coronavirus pandemic or the shift to remote working. No matter the motivation, the following factors are essential for successful cloud operations.
Define the cloud strategy
Businesses should adopt an effective due diligence process before starting their journey to the cloud. They should build their strategy and define measurable business objectives, principles, and priorities that will guide decision-making.Â
Additionally, companies should invest time and effort to find the right partners and cloud providers to help them achieve their objectives. This means investing time and effort to seek and discover the providers’ development roadmaps, contingency plans and even get client references if possible.
Finally, since the cloud is an ever-expanding ecosystem, businesses should take the time to educate their corporate stakeholders and executives and seek technical help to close the skills gap.
Plan cloud security carefully
Cloud security is the primary concern for security teams and CISOs. In Cybersecurity Insiders’ 2020 Cloud Security Report, 75 percent of respondents said they were either “very concerned” or “extremely concerned” about public cloud security. Continuity Central reported that security in the cloud is even more challenging, seeing how 68% of respondents said that their employers used two or more different public cloud providers. This means that security teams must use multiple native tools to enforce security across their employers’ cloud infrastructure.
Security leaders must introduce their organisation to the Shared Responsibilities Model, which places the responsibility of data protection and encryption at the hands of the enterprise. To embrace a multi-cloud environment while keeping some on-premises equipment, businesses will need to invest in a single, central, vendor-agnostic solution that can help protect all enterprise assets – on-premises and in the cloud.
Another critical factor is to effectively authenticate everyone who requests access to the company’s assets. With the development of cloud platforms, organisational boundaries are blurred, and trust becomes a liability rather than an asset. Make use of Zero Trust security concepts and develop an attitude of “trust nothing, always verify.”
Another factor to consider is that employees and apps interact with cloud workloads, which serve as ports of entry into corporate networks and can be exploited by cybercriminals. Therefore, the utilisation of several cloud platforms and a lack of visibility into these endpoints create a larger attack surface. To effectively safeguard these cloud-based endpoints, businesses must adjust their standard security policies by implementing EDR solutions for workloads that provide continuous visibility and enable proactive threat detection.Â
Develop a Cloud Centre of Excellence
Businesses should strike a critical balance between technology adoption speed and operational stability. Emerging cloud technologies require business operations to adapt quickly. A multidisciplinary Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) can identify the tools and processes that enable development teams to provide high-quality digital experiences to customers with confidence and agility. Driven by collaboration between cloud architects, program managers, and engineers, CCoE can accelerate innovation and cloud migration, reduce the overall cost and increase business agility. Instead of being a walled, abstract department, the CCoE strategy views IT as a collaborator in achieving business goals.
Build strong relationships with cloud providers
Cloud providers are partners in a company’s effort to disrupt a market and achieve a competitive edge. A business’s relationship with its cloud providers should not be static but dynamic and fluid, evolving and transforming in tandem with cloud technology advancements. Enterprises should aim to connect with their cloud vendor that allows them to tap into their expertise for strategic advice, workload prioritisation, and other services.
The journey to the cloud is different for every organisation, but these above essential factors are pertinent to all. The core of a business’s success will be defining their plan before they embark on the road to the cloud, with cloud security at the forefront of this plan. Recognising that cloud operations include developing and maintaining close relationships with both their provider and new technologies while keeping one eye on the future will ensure that businesses get the most out of the cloud.
