Why You Must Hire an Expert for Cloud Migration

More and more businesses are migrating to the cloud, as they should be. It’s a more cost effective way to run your business and store data, it’s more secure and it takes responsibility off of your business. Once you migrate, automation becomes simpler as well. In a previous article, it was mentioned that it is crucial to hire an expert for cloud migration. Let’s dive into exactly why it’s so crucial to ensure the proper person is conducting your migration.

Today’s coders lack security knowledge. It’s not their fault, security isn’t taught to coders in school. It’s not part of most computer science programs today and is often shrugged off as being someone else’s problem. So when a coder graduates and gets a job, they know how to program and code, but their code can create weaknesses simply because they don’t know how to code securely. It’s not a mentality that they have, which is a problem when it comes to cloud migration.

There are numerous products offered by cloud service providers. There are different levels of services within those products, all at varying price points with varying limits. The way you run your business will dictate the levels you should purchase. But before you do that, having a cloud expert who has a fundamental understanding of how the cloud works is imperative to ensuring you are paying for the right things.

If you don’t hire an expert, you end up with lift-and-shift syndrome as a best case scenario. Worst case is the migration doesn’t happen at all and you’re stuck paying for services you aren’t using because no one knows how to do it. Sure, there’s a checklist to be had for implementing cloud migration. But if you don’t have the proper understanding, if you’re not going to study and learn the cloud and you need that checklist in front of you, then you don’t natively understand it. In which case, you probably shouldn’t be migrating to the cloud, you should be talking to someone or having someone guide you through the process. Otherwise you will likely end up doing things incorrectly and create problems.

The fundamental principles of working in the cloud follow a lot of the fundamental principles in general security. Least privilege applies, so not giving access to someone who doesn’t need it. If they do need access, granting the least amount possible while still allowing them to work effectively and efficiently. Least availability, reducing the attack surface and other basic principles of security. Ensuring you have audit logs turned on, you’re getting reports and alerts because you can’t secure what you can’t see. And expert for cloud migration will ensure you are properly set up.

But it’s not just understanding the fundamentals of security, you can understand that and still have problems. In the cloud, you should also know how you’re using cloud services, where things are within the provider you’re using. And then take it a step deeper: You already follow least privilege, but what are all the ways you can do that within your cloud service?

When you hire an expert to help you with cloud migration, that expert can set up templates to help you follow rules and principles. They can show you the ways to make sure those principles have to be adhered to by setting up automation. The automation can make sure that the principles must be followed. They can show you ways to set up specific auditing reports, collection and alerting to make sure you know if principles are not being followed. When you are alerted to a problem, you can address it. But again, you can’t secure what you can’t see.

While you might have a fantastic coder on your staff, someone who’s really good at writing structurally sound and even secure lines of code, they may not be the person you want migrating your business to the cloud. You need to have an expert for cloud migration, someone who understands how the cloud functions, the best way to make it work for your business, how to secure everything properly, to help you with this process. NOT hiring an expert will result in the migration not happening, or the migration will have serious security weaknesses that leave your business exposed to bad actors all over the globe.

About the Author

PWV Consultants is a boutique group of industry leaders and influencers from the digital tech, security and design industries that acts as trusted technical partners for many Fortune 500 companies, high-visibility startups, universities, defense agencies, and NGOs. Founded by 20-year software engineering veterans, who have founded or co-founder several companies. PWV experts act as a trusted advisors and mentors to numerous early stage startups, and have held the titles of software and software security executive, consultant and professor. PWV's expert consulting and advisory work spans several high impact industries in finance, media, medical tech, and defense contracting. PWV's founding experts also authored the highly influential precursor HAZL (jADE) programming language.

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