A 6-Step Checklist for a Successful & Secure Cloud Modernization

Define success. First and foremost, determine what a successful transformation looks like and communicate this to your teams. In many cases, team members will go forward in supporting the transformation without understanding why they're doing it — they do it simply because "my boss is telling me to."

To avoid this, develop long- and short-term objectives to illustrate your organization's desired end state to team members. Key performance indicators (KPIs) enable you to measure the positive impact of your security, cost-reduction, scaling, and innovation efforts. Timelines set realistic deadlines to achieve goals while accounting for budget as well as comprehending people, process, and technology.

Increase visibility. Security cannot exist without visibility — you can't protect what you can't see. By staying on top of change, and monitoring and analyzing migrated workloads and applications, you acquire insights about vulnerabilities and whether any visibility gaps exist with respect to security, compliance, and audit requirements.

Champion security as an enabler. You have to promote and embed security into each stage of the cloud transformation. Embrace a “shift left” model. Security must affect every decision moving forward. Bolting it on at the end of the IT process effectively treats it as an afterthought. This will cause schedule delays and headaches which can damage your operations, customer base, and organization's reputation.

Adapt risk tolerance. Any transformation effort will bring risks. For example, deploying containers will save on costs while boosting agility, but it will also introduce a new computing model, thereby elevating risks. You can still manage this risk, but you will need to maintain visibility and security controls over these new operating environments. That's the kind of tradeoff and understanding required to move your organization forward.

Pursue a shared security responsibility model (SSRM). As your cloud footprint grows, you need to understand what you are responsible for and what the cloud provider covers. Understand that even if you are not able to bear all the responsibility, you are able to shift more of the burden of protection to the service provider, which can offer significant advantages. They can do everything from managing prevention tools to patching your operating systems, applications, and virtualized components.

Think beyond just moving workloads to the cloud. This is a good first step, but there is more to extracting efficiencies by leveraging the cloud than just "lifting and shifting." Every business has its own needs, and refactoring applications can allow you to take advantage of more options across applications, storage, network, and computing. Beyond right-sizing your compute profile, you can explore different models that may lead to additional savings: