In the years past, for several reasons the Cloud was adjudged too risky for businesses to onboard.  The government was very skeptical for reasons of data security, privacy concerns and trust. 

fast forward, today the adoption of the cloud has skyrocketed. Both the government and private sector have embraced it with several key business drivers serving as impetuses and the enabler being the emergence and maturity of key technologies such as virtualization and platform development toolsets.  With this, businesses have offloaded a significant portion of datacenter and on-premise computing, application development and business operations to the cloud.  Added to this, the Internet of Things (IOT) phenomenon has taken off as manufacturing and other business concerns sign-on to it.  All of this has given rise to a new enterprise network and information systems that has subsumed the former Cloud-less and IOT-less enterprise network and information systems.

In effect, the way employees work, the technologies they use, and the regulations they must abide by are constantly changing.  This makes protecting business assets more and more complicated and complex.

The key here is for organizations exploring cloud offerings and adoption to be aware of what needs to be in place before they embark on the journey.  Often, the organization should satisfactorily answer the following questions to be successful:

• How are we going to successfully integrate our on-premises IT operations into the cloud?
• How do we determine the security risk of moving to the cloud?
• With more devices accessing our network, is our corporate mobile device security policy adequate and effective?
• If we make changes to our network, will we compromise reliability or security?
• With our IT resources maxed out, how can we handle constant security changes?
• How does moving to the cloud affect on-premises IT and business operations?

Often answers to these are dependent on many factors. For a start a proper risk assessment needs to be conducted. In addition, the organization will need support that can help address customers’ security requirements while planning for the latest security technology adoption for the organization’s network.

In part II of this blog we will explore how organizations can be positioned for a successful cloud adoption.