6 things to consider when migrating to the cloud

Since the introduction of the cloud, a steady stream of companies has opted to move its most sensitive data from on-premises to remote storage, making it available from anywhere and in real time.

Even the world’s most conservative companies have gotten in on the act, as digital has found an increasingly important role across industries.

For any organization integrating cloud into its core tech stack, it’s important to recognize the opportunities and risks that come with a new environment, and to plan appropriately.

The first consideration—and one that is top of mind for every IT professional—is security risk. When a cloud provider expects its customers to be responsible for securing their own applications but doesn’t give them the mechanisms to properly do so, the customer is exposed to increased risk.

To ensure they have control of their data in a way that meets—and, ideally, exceeds—their organization’s requirements, companies should be familiar with modern tools such as feature switches and Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) encryption.

It’s also important to think about how you’re going to manage your cloud vendors/providers. In order to manage your infrastructure such as networks, storage, services, data management, and virtualization, you’ll likely be working with several cloud providers, including cloud data integration and cloud BI providers.

Then there are: the vendors who provide the tools you need to create applications such as operating systems; and the SaaS applications you need to provide business value including business intelligence and data visualization tools.

But first, define how each provider fits into your cloud ecosystem, and determine which technologies you want to manage within your company and which you would like to delegate to your providers.

You’ll also want to ensure that you have the flexibility to add new providers to your model and integrate them smoothly. Domo allows you to integrate seamlessly with cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake and Amazon Redshift with both federated data queries and a native integration, so there’s no need to move data to make it accessible for business intelligence.

A third thing you should consider is how providers align with your data governance models. Cloud-based integration platforms can compress development cycles by incorporating new data sources and users quickly, and by adding governance and certification processes.

Look for metadata management capabilities and ways to ensure data quality. Domo provides data lineage tools for you to quickly view stats for individual datasets and see the upstream and downstream impacts of any changes on your data, as well as data certification workflows.

You should also consider governance models for sharing data with customers and partners outside your company. Even if you are only sharing data within the walls of your company now, consider how embedded analytics tools like Domo Everywhere can help you manage governance for both internal and external users.

As your company grows, you must ensure that your cloud ecosystem can scale with more users and more data. So, look for providers that don’t require manual processes and operations to implement data governance across complex data integrations.

How you maintain control of your outsourced data is something else to consider. A provider that manages your data for you can help free up your business to focus on core issues, but it introduces concerns about security.

Therefore, ensure that your cloud providers understand the complexities of security risks, and that they have an organizational commitment to security. They should also have ongoing security standards reviews.

Look for security features that include multiple security layers; least privilege and separation of duties access models; transport layer encryption and encryption at rest; and logs for network, system, and application events.

In addition to these security features, Domo provides customer-managed security features so you can stay in control of your data and have full data transparency.

These features include SAML-based SSO, multi-factor authentication, IP address restrictions, security profiles, and BYOK encryption, allowing you to manage your data in accordance with your company’s security and compliance requirements.

Once you’ve determined which vendors meet your needs for data governance and security, you’ll also want to understand how and when to expect updates to their products.

You should have a schedule of how often updates to each system happen, have visibility into what is changing with each update, and understand how any updates may impact the other systems in your cloud ecosystem.

You should also prepare your business users for any updates that will impact their daily workflows. In order to prevent disruption, you need a holistic view of the updates for systems that you manage as well as those managed by providers.

To learn more about migrating data to the cloud in the safest possible way, click here.