Cloud Technology Migrations

A lot of discussion has happened, particularly in the last 5 or 6 years, about cloud migration and a lot of people and companies are doing everything they can to become experts on the topic and offer these services. However, you or your organization might be reluctant to invest into the cloud. This can be from having the fear that you lose control of your data, lack of understanding overall, or a slew of other potential reasons. Let’s explore some of the more common reasons heard and see if we can dispel some of these fears and distribute some reliable information.

So, what IS cloud migration? Well in the most essential manner of speaking, it means taking the servers you own, regardless of whether they are in a closet or a datacenter and moving all the functions they fulfill to servers or services in the cloud. A task that is assuredly easier said than done. There are also multiple levels of cloud integration, this won’t go into the details but it can range from taking a 1:1 migration of your local machines into the cloud virtual machines, all the way up to integrating with all the various services offered by the cloud provider and taking your virtual machine count down to zero or very nearly zero.

So, now you might ask; what are the benefits? Well, for starters you stop having to worry about physical devices. This means no more worrying about hard drive failures, power outages, server upgrades, internet service, the list truly goes on and on. All that goes away. Next up, cost savings. It might not be immediate as it does require effort to setup but all that physicality above has a great cost. It’s hard to give you a formula for savings but any consultancy service would be able to determine a rough estimate during discovery.

Now let’s set the record straight on some of the reasons you might be reluctant or afraid of jumping onto the cloud. Here are 3 of the more common ones.

Q: Won’t that give <cloud provider here> access to all my sensitive data?
A: Not if setup correctly, you might read about data leaks online but the headlines tend to leave out things like misconfigurations or maybe using the wrong tool for the wrong job. You can setup solutions to be incredibly secure. So in a short answer, no, AWS does not have access to all of your environment and its files.

Q: What happens if <cloud provider> goes away?
A: This is a super rare occurrence and extremely unlikely for the larger providers. It essentially only happens if you’re using small or local cloud providers. Even then, you would have plenty of notice beforehand.

Q: What if <cloud provider> is hacked?
A: While not impossible, it’s not worth losing sleep over. If things are configured properly then even if they get hacked, it is still relatively safe for your data because the provider shouldn’t have any access for them to leak. In today’s world, it’s much more likely that your on-premise servers are vulnerable than a cloud providers.

These are obviously not the full list of worries someone might have but they give you an idea
that for most of your concerns there is probably a good answer to address them. It’s hard to answer the original question in a complete way because every setup is unique in some way, but it’s definitely worth looking at the cloud seriously for your operations as the benefits are massive and the drawbacks are far and few between.