The pandemic accelerated many businesses’ plans to shift digital operations to the cloud because employees were working from home. But has the rush to make business operations useable in the cloud meant security sacrifices?
Cloud migrations are not always perfect even in ideal times, but rushed timelines lead to mistakes, such as applications not working correctly, security gaps, and bringing over decades worth of “junk,” according to CIO Dive.
“You’re stuck with this existential question: do we move quickly, or do we strangle the business?” Greg Petersen, senior director of IT security for Avanade, told CIO Dive. “When you move quickly, you’re usually making tradeoffs.”
According to the INAP State of Infrastructure Management Report, 54% of IT professionals and senior company leaders surveyed said the pandemic spurred their organizations to move applications and workloads off site.
In 2021, these businesses should address the tradeoffs that may have occurred from last year’s quick “lift and shift” migration to the cloud. Right-sizing cloud capacity and filling security gaps is important, even if businesses expect some employees to return to the workplace in 2021.
For example, a push to enable single sign-on across an organization might have maximized usability but also made the network less secure, Petersen said. Now is the time to go back and figure out how to reinforce that security without sacrificing usability.
Companies may have also skipped over disaster recovery plans, too. “You don’t really think about that when you’re already in a disaster,” Petersen said. But hurricanes, wildfires, and snowstorms still happen.
