“More than 85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025 to fully execute their digital strategy.- Gartner 

The concept of the workplace has undergone a huge transition in recent years. The rise of remote and hybrid working has made it essential for organizations to adopt a cloud-first strategy in terms of their environment. Today’s employees demand anytime, anywhere yet secured access to function-critical data and the organizations have to oblige. It’s no wonder then, that Gartner expects a massive growth in cloud adaption. It anticipates cloud adaption to grow by $169 billion by the end of 2022 (as compared to 2020). 

Undoubtedly, the benefits of a cloud environment are multifold. It delivers scalability, increases efficiency, enables cost saving, and ensures stringent security. Bearing these in mind, it’s no wonder that there is a massive exodus to the cloud presently ongoing. 

Despite delivering a multitude of benefits, the cloud computing platform may also pose certain risks and challenges. These are largely due to the lack of the right strategy, improper utilization of cloud services, and lack of governance or security control based on organizational requirements. Most of these risks stamp from improper strategizing during cloud migration. While there are plenty of resources available on the internet regarding the best practices for cloud migration, it would also be apt to point out some of the dangers of improper migration and the risk it might pose. Cloud security service experts can ensure the end to end security. 

  1. Lack of Visibility: The on-premise data center model delivers organizations with clear visibility over the data and resources. The resources can be segregated based on the location and roles of the users. On the other hand, a lack of a proper cloud migration strategy often leads to less/no visibility of resources and access control. 
  2. Failure to Protect Sensitive Data: In the traditional environment, organizations have various mechanisms and access controls to protect their sensitive data; options included locking physical locations, deploying offline services, isolating data networks, etc. Whereas in the cloud model; even sensitive data is available over the public network and unless you follow a proper migration strategy, perform due diligence, and tag sensitive data for strict access control; there is a high probability of data theft and cyber-attacks. 
  3. Issues with Resource Provisioning: One of the biggest advantages of the cloud is the ability to easily provision resources on-demand. Organizations can add new employees into the mix seamlessly. However, this same advantage can also pose security risks in large organizations where employees are added and removed from projects. Without strict vigilance, data can be accessed by people not meant to view them.
  4. Inability in assigning right access controls: Cloud delivers organizations with a varied set of roles, responsibilities, and access controls to ensure data and application security. However, the issue for most organizations and their IT teams is regarding the availability of too many options. Most IT departments of Cloud fail to understand the right roles for a certain employee. This risks organizational data security. In an on-premise environment, the IT has a better understanding of roles, responsibilities, and access controls created as per company policy and operations.

In a nutshell:

While migrating to the cloud, keep in mind to improve strategies implicating test execution of visibility, coverage, and compliance. Preparing and implementing a proper migration strategy with secured configuration settings ensure a seamless work environment for any organization.