3 Questions to Ask Before Migrating Workloads to the Cloud

Every day in business brings new obstacles as well as opportunities for growth. As consumer demands change and increase, companies are continuously reassessing their workloads and finding ways to migrate them strategically to the cloud. 

Companies are increasingly adopting the software as a service (SaaS) model to replace traditionally on-premises workloads, and the benefits are numerous and well-documented. However, to successfully adopt a SaaS model, it’s important to first consider security and governance surrounding workloads.

With careful planning, you can help your organization establish a solid foundation for managing and scaling security and governance in SaaS-based environments.

Here are three questions to consider before migrating your workload to the cloud.

This might sound like an obvious question, but you’d be surprised at how many organizations overlook the development and oversight of an access list for effective workload management.

Reach out to your appropriate stakeholders to determine which resources a user or group should be licensed for and ensure that users are added to groups with a granular set of license entitlements. This includes categories such as email-only, personal data storage and collaboration platforms.

Leverage a combination of device management techniques to ensure that users work only from approved devices. This means that you might have to double check all your approved devices are indeed in compliance. (You will be thankful you did.)

If you don’t already do so, incorporate access policies to block authentication from unapproved devices. Protecting your workloads and other valuable information from being compromised should always be top priority.

This question is nuanced, with several factors to keep in mind. When thinking about how users can interact with company data, CDW poses additional questions to address with your team. Here are a few:

• Are users able to share data with others outside the organization?
• Are they able to exfiltrate data out of the cloud environment by downloading or printing it?
• Are they able to manipulate the security settings on a set of data by granting access to others inside the organization?

These behaviors can — and should — be configured for data loss prevention, insider risk management and other compliance features.

Also, don’t forget to implement additional security measures such as two-factor authentication.

We understand the importance of security and governance when it comes to migrating your workload. Our knowledgeable experts will work with you to help develop an organizational vision as well as technology and licensing requirements regarding SaaS partners.

Once your organization meets these security and governance requirements, CDW can then assist you in moving your production data, applications and services to a SaaS-based solution.