An Effective Cloud Assessment Addresses Baseline Needs
Completing a cloud assessment while choosing vendors is critical to ensuring that the vendor can meet your specific requirements. If they can’t, they either need to be written off, or you may need to use multiple vendors and move toward a multicloud environment.
To get a better sense of whether a cloud vendor passes muster, IT leaders need to ask themselves several questions:
- What are my availability requirements?
- How viable is Software as a Service for my department or the departments I support?
- What policies and regulations do I have to consider as I make my selections?
- Do I plan to develop my own apps in the cloud?
Having specific answers to these high-level questions will go a long way toward eliminating certain vendors and narrowing the scope of who you choose to work with.
LEARN MORE: Agencies can prepare for a secure, seamless cloud migration.
Determine What You Should Migrate to the Cloud
A cloud assessment can help you understand which data and applications need to remain onsite. In some cases, legacy systems won’t play nicely with cloud infrastructure. In others, maintaining control over sensitive data and the applications that leverage it is a top priority, which makes colocation or on-premises favorable.
Consequently, most state and local agencies gravitate toward a hybrid cloud environment, selectively offloading certain applications into the cloud. Others use the cloud exclusively for backups and disaster recovery.
Knowing what you need to keep on-premises and what a cloud vendor can manage warrants an in-depth conversation with your prospective vendor (or vendors) about how they deal with hybrid setups.
DIVE DEEPER: CDW’s 2024 CDW Cloud Computing Research Report aids in cloud migration.
Know Your Security Vulnerabilities Before Moving to the Cloud
Short-staffed IT departments often lack the time or resources to address ever-changing cybersecurity needs. An honest assessment of your agency’s security vulnerabilities will help you decide what cloud services you want to examine and which vendors will have the best tools to help you accomplish your security goals.
It’s also worth noting that existing security flaws are often simply lifted and shifted into the cloud. Without the introspection of a security assessment, it’s easy to repeat old mistakes in a new environment. A cloud assessment can flag unaddressed vulnerabilities and strengthen your long-term security posture.
Furthermore, cloud security has its idiosyncrasies. If you ultimately decide to move certain workloads to the cloud, it’s important to have some idea of how you will secure your new cloud or hybrid infrastructure.
SECURE IT: SSEs boost cloud-native application security.
Learn About Your Cloud Vendor’s Business Practices
It’s hard to ensure the security of your data if you don’t know your vendor partner’s practices for securing that data. Have a detailed discussion with the vendor and ask pointed questions about how it can ensure your data will be safe and accessible.
For instance, where are your cloud provider’s backups located? This is especially important for agencies that must comply with federal, state and local regulations governing data privacy. Additionally, delays could occur if the backups are stored in a location that your systems cannot access. It’s also important to inquire about uptime and availability zones.
Collaborate with Vendors to Make the Migration Process Smoother
Simply porting your current data set and applications from in-house servers to the cloud is one way to operate, but it may not address all of your security or data availability concerns. Doing so may close off access to tools and applications that make things easier for employees, administrators and IT staff.
As part of the cloud assessment process, openness to vendors’ ideas and a willingness to collaborate on changes and upgrades will minimize the need for an abundance of incremental changes down the road.
