Getting Cloud Ready: Building Readiness Requirements into Cloud Migration Planning
Mar 29, 2021
Each of us live with requirements that dictate how we move through the world. Laws and regulations keep us in check, simplify our daily lives, and ensure we do not harm ourselves or others. Without traffic laws, for example, imagine how much time we would spend figuring out which side of the road we should drive on.
Just like laws that dictate traffic, apps and systems need to “play by the rules” in order to work for your organization. Readiness requirements are the compliance rules that your applications need to meet in order to work within your current systems.
Read on to find out how to make readiness requirements a priority in your cloud migration plan – and avoid future compliance emergencies.
Understanding App “Readiness”
In order to make readiness requirements a priority, you need to understand what they are – and what your company needs from each application for it to comply with policies around data security.
Readiness requirements include regulations around data back-ups, emergency preparedness, security, and more. Some examples include:
HIPAA or FERPA compliance.
Frequency of data backups.
Password protection and access regulations; and
Maximum offline time during an emergency or disaster.
In most cases, your company already has a set of policies in place around compliance and readiness. Working with your compliance, security, and disaster recovery teams during planning will ensure you have a solid understanding of the minimum requirements your company needs to move forward with implementation.
When it Comes to Compliance, Plan Ahead
Many people assume that cloud solutions come with built in security and compliance requirements. But most cloud solutions do not automatically include these defaults. If you make assumptions about your cloud systems compliance standards, you are almost certainly in for an unpleasant surprise in the future.
In order to ensure compliance during migration, you need to work with your compliance and security departments ahead of time. Security, Compliance, and Disaster Recovery will need to take a close look at application requirements before implementation – if you include them late in the process, it might lead to tedious reworking and duplicate effort.
Be Proactive – and Compliant
Compliance should not be an afterthought. As we mentioned in our previous post about stakeholder involvement, having expert insight at each stage is essential for an efficient migration process.
Talk to your security experts early on, and make sure you have a clear understanding of what you need from an application before you begin your planning.
This series takes a comprehensive look at six rules for successful cloud migration. We have covered the importance of a proactive mindset and a holistic plan, considered the importance of looking at value over cost and the nuances of cost assessment, and discussed strategies to include all your stakeholders – including security and compliance personnel – in your migration plan.
Asim Iqbal
Asim is Enquizit’s CTO and a member of the founding team. He has been an SME on security, storage, and resilience as well as Enquizit’s Lead Architect and VP of Solution Architecture. Among his professional endeavors is the implementation of a weather modeling HPC setup for Environment Canada, storage design and implementation for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind’s library, Media ingestion, encryption, and transcoding architecture for Bell Satellite TV, Cloud infrastructure, resilience, and security architecture and implementation for The Common Application and complete migration of Harvard Business Review’s Primary and DR data center to AWS. He maintains a strong personal interest in frictionless technical designs focused on end-user happiness and employee satisfaction, still thinks that ‘Data Availability Architect’ (from his early days working with HPE) is the coolest certification title ever and is an ex-CISSP. He neither confirms nor denies his purported afflictions with coffee, slow travel, and cats with unbridled spirits.
