Cloud Migration Risks: Overcoming the Data Security Challenges of Cloud Adoption

As organizations continue to modernize their data infrastructure, the cloud has become essential for achieving greater flexibility and agility. However, shifting to public cloud services requires a balance of business opportunities, cyber resilience, and cost optimization. This means enabling the business to be agile while still focusing on data minimization and ensuring least-privileged access to sensitive data and workloads.

For most organizations, the advantages of cloud adoption — from cost-efficiency and scalability to improved data accessibility— far outweigh the risks of moving data to the cloud. 

Why Organizations Are Migrating Data to the Cloud

Cloud adoption provides many different benefits — from improved accessibility and collaboration to greater scalability and cost-efficiency. This makes migrating data to the cloud an important step forward for organizations modernizing their data infrastructure. 

From an end user perspective, cloud-based applications and services improve accessibility by making data available anytime, anywhere, using any device over the Internet. With the cloud it’s also easier for end users to work together in real time on documents, spreadsheets, and data analytics projects using data sources accessible in the cloud. 

In addition, cloud resources are more scalable and cost efficient. The elasticity of the cloud helps organizations align costs more closely with actual usage because of the pay-as-you-go cloud model. 

The Key Risks With Operating in the Cloud

There are enormous benefits to migrating data to the cloud, but data security and managing data sprawl remains a challenge. Even organizations that have been operating securely on premise for years face an entirely new world of potential vulnerabilities in the cloud. Here are some of the key cloud data risks:

• Data Loss: If cloud backups aren’t configured properly, system failures or accidental deletions could lead to permanent loss of important data. Data loss can be mitigated by implementing a disaster recovery strategy that includes regular backups.
• Data Exposure: The cloud makes it easy for access permissions to be granted to a lot of users, introducing a greater risk than ever for data to be exposed to those who shouldn't have access to it in the first place. Data exposures can be mitigated with stringent access controls and user permissions that are frequently audited.
• Data Breaches: Cloud environment misconfigurations or inadequate security measures could lead to data breaches, exposing sensitive information to unauthorized third parties. Once again, strong security measures related to access controls and user permissions can reduce the risk of a data breach.
• Compliance Violations: Since cloud data is more easily moved or copied, it’s harder to enforce governance policies that adhere to regulatory standards and compliance requirements. By maintaining an accurate data inventory, organizations can more easily maintain compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and other regulations.
• Data Storage Costs: There can be unexpected cloud storage costs when data is more easily copied and duplicated. Focusing on data minimization and only retaining necessary data is a great way to reduce resource consumption, and in turn, cloud storage costs.

How Cyera Strengthens Your Cloud Migration Efforts

Cyera is a data security platform that can help you confidentially secure the data you’ve migrated to the cloud and ensure continuity in your cloud security posture from on-premise to the cloud.

Holistic Visibility

Cyera automatically generates an inventory of your cloud data — whether you’re just getting started or have been migrating to the cloud for years. This includes continuously discovering new cloud datastores you might not even know about yet. Cyera can also detect duplicate files and stale data that would increase your infrastructure costs and potential attack surface in the cloud.

Compliance Assurance

Cyera automatically and intelligently classifies all your data to determine whether it’s PII, PHI, or other sensitive data. This gives you the insights you need to isolate data to specific regions or separate data stores with restricted permissions. You’ll also be able to detect misplaced data that’s moving outside certain geographic boundaries to prevent violations of data residency or sovereignty laws.

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)

Cyera’s data security posture management solution assesses data risks for each of your cloud environments based on where the data is, who has access to it, and how it’s being used. Cyera prioritizes issues that potentially threaten data and provides automated remediation to quickly fix the issue.

Multi Cloud Data Detect & Response (DDR)

Cyera provides multi cloud data detect and response (DDR) capabilities by flagging suspicious data activities and alerting security operations teams in real time. This protects against data exposures, configuration changes, and non-sanctioned data access as they occur. 

Cloud Storage Cost Optimization

Cyera helps you discover, identify, and eliminate unnecessary data to optimize cloud storage costs. Eliminating unnecessary data can not only reduce cloud storage costs, but also reduce the potential attack surface for phishing, ransomware, and other cybersecurity attacks.

Confidently Migrate Data with Cyera

Businesses continue to move to the cloud to improve productivity and deliver a better customer experience, but it’s also new territory for many organizations. A data security platform like Cyera helps organizations balance business opportunities, cyber resilience, and cost optimization when adopting cloud services.

To learn more about how Cyera can help you with cloud data security and cost optimization, schedule a demo today.