5 Things to Consider When Migrating to AWS

1. Lack of staffing and knowledge can limit cloud adoption

A recent Gartner report titled “2021-2023 Emerging Technology Roadmap” highlights the lack of skilled IT workers that impacts cloud adoption and other business boosters such as edge networks and computing, along with AI and automation. The report details that:

Assuming an organization has the IT talent and knowledge, migration to the cloud can still take many months or longer for those with complex existing digital business operations. For those that don’t have the internal skills, there are plenty of managed service providers (MSPs) and integration partners to help take on much of the work, which is often repeatable across customers, simplifying the process.

Upskilling your team or hiring experts can reduce the time cloud migration projects take and provide the DevOps know-how to maximize your return on investment.

2. Without a strong business case, cloud migration will fail

However you plan to move to the cloud, there are plenty of existing guidelines and best practices to follow to get a foothold on your ladder to the cloud. Creating a strong business use case is essential to preparing for a successful migration. With no valid business reasoning, any migration will ultimately fail.

Amazon’s own “How to Migrate” documents explain the route to success and highlight their own tools that help evaluate a migration and track the process when a migration starts, along with recommending resources from partners that can help businesses in specific markets.

3. Building in security for your migration

Any cloud migration requires a great deal of planning and infrastructure around security. Securing the cloud demands more than the traditional on-premises applications, as well as the understanding of who is responsible for what, as detailed by Amazon’s cloud shared responsibility model.

Beyond understanding the basics, tools such as Fortinet's FortiWeb web application firewall (WAF) is a product that can protect your web applications and APIs. With little or no need to deploy and manage infrastructure, tools like these are fast to deploy and often use machine-learning to identify new risks and counteract the latest threats, before a human could react or a business could patch its traditional service.

Key to business operations is protecting the cloud on-ramps, the direct links between data centers and clouds or within multi-cloud environments, through the use of next-generation firewalls (NGFW). This creates an integrated cloud security approach covering any environment and future-proofing the business as it expands.

While the cloud security map can look complex as it protects incoming and outgoing data, many of the tools through automation reduce the effort to operate them, and function as a cohesive whole to protect the business better than any one solution that organizations become overly reliant on.

Fortinet’s tools work together with smart integrations to provide a layered approach to security across clouds and SD-WAN networks. WAF rules help establish robust security controls that can be changed as and when required by the business, ensuring flexible protection.

4. Not everything should be migrated

Even in the global transition to the cloud, not every area of a business could or should be migrated. Some business-critical tasks are perhaps best left to the end of a full-scale migration, allowing the business to become familiar with the process first.

Some obscure or niche services that rely on custom code, especially projects where none of the original staff remain, are a notable problem area. These should be rebuilt from scratch in the cloud, and heavily tested to ensure full functionality before adding the force-multipliers the cloud offers.

All of these should be filtered into the overall cloud migration plan as the business decides what can deliver quick wins and what could create problems that will impact the business.

5. Best practices and team support build success

It’s rarely just the IT team that are focused on a cloud migration. Every user and manager needs to be able to see the benefits, risks and implied changes. Spreading this knowledge around the company and getting feedback will help ensure that everyone understands why a cloud migration is needed and how it will improve operations for all.

Having the whole company on your side is easier than springing a migration on an unsuspecting workforce, especially when team members can provide valuable insights about what works, doesn’t work or works in a curious way that part of the IT team might not know about.

Cloud migrations will also need to take into account any shadow IT habits that the company may have picked up over time. Departments may have adopted unofficial applications or ways of communication that aren’t on the official digital office plan. Resolving these issues before migrating will prevent a lot of pain later on.

Whatever the scale and ambition of your cloud migration, taking a measured approach with key focused goals and an understanding of all the risks and roadblocks will lead to a more manageable actual process. Fully adopting the cloud without considered planning and effective security will only lead to chaos and put even fast-growing businesses at risk. 

Further reading

• How to Identify and Eliminate Zero-Day Vulnerabilities in Hybrid Cloud Networks
• 3 Mistakes to Avoid When Moving to the Cloud — A Unified Security Policy Guide
• Automatically Scale Cloud Security With Ease on Amazon Web Services