Cloud migration

Your workstations must be appropriately secured – with managed antivirus, up-to-date security patches, and up-to-date operating system patches. They should be centrally managed.

The security of your remote workstations is even more important. It is necessary to ensure only the staff member has access to your systems and data when your workstation may be physically accessible by others (e.g. household members and guests). Security must be maintained on the remote location network – for example, home Wi-Fi is inherently less secure than wired connections in your office and many residential internet routers are installed with default (well known) passwords making hacking the network trivial.

When using the cloud, a network failure in your office is a critical event. Your network should have in-built resilience and have up-to-date security and IoS patching. Network devices should be proactively monitored and managed.

When using the cloud, the connection to your internet provider is a critical link. If your internet connection goes down, you lose access to your applications and data. Careful re-design of your connection will minimise your down- time. Protecting your internet connection(s) is also necessary and usually means using a firewall.

Products that are fully cloud-based can be time-consuming to set-up, configure, and train for maximum productivity – for example the Microsoft365 suite. While Microsoft365 will work “out-of-the-box”, setting up integration and productivity enhancing workflows often takes specialist skills and experience.

Some vendors have industry-specific applications that are not particularly friendly to set-up in the cloud and need specialist skills.

Then there is disaster recovery. Depending on the applications you are using this can be simple to implement, or quite complex requiring specialist skills.

What do you do if your cloud vendor or mission-critical application “goes away? Sometimes it is better to use a hybrid cloud approach where you keep your “crown jewels” applications and data on-premises or in a local private cloud facility.