Stay Xmas-ed, Cloud-ed and secure

As the holiday season approaches, you may be looking forward to some well-deserved time off. However, you don’t want to miss any important upshots in your business. Have you considered migrating your business systems to the Cloud? Doing so could enable you to easily oversee your business from anywhere, including during the holiday season. Did you know that Gartner forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to reach $679 Billion in 2024?

What exactly is Cloud computing?

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet, to “the Cloud”. Those resources are hosted at a remote data center and managed by a Cloud Service Provider (CSP), which in turn provides customers with access to them through the Internet.

What are the benefits of Cloud computing?

• Scalability: Cloud computing allows businesses to scale their IT resources up or down quickly and easily to meet your business’s changing demands.
• Agility: Cloud platforms enable businesses to swiftly and effortlessly deploy new applications and services, without the need to purchase and provision new hardware and software.
• Lower cost: Cloud services can help businesses save money by reducing the need for hardware, software and IT staff.
• Efficiency: Cloud computing can help businesses improve efficiency by centralizing IT resources and automating tasks.
• Productivity: Cloud computing can help businesses improve productivity by giving employees access to the resources they need from anywhere in the world.

What are the key steps involved in Cloud Transformation?

Cloud Transformation is a strategic, comprehensive process that includes migrating, optimizing, and managing an organization’s workloads, applications and data to a cloud platform, delivering desired benefits of cloud computing.

• Assessment and Planning: These steps involve creating a strategic plan that aligns with the organization’s business goals and objectives. The first step is to evaluate the organization’s current IT infrastructure, applications, data and business processes to identify opportunities for cloud migration and potential challenges. Once the evaluation is complete, a detailed roadmap should be created outlining the migration strategy, timelines, resource allocation, and budget.
• Migration: This step includes Application, Data and Infrastructure Migration. During this process, IT landscape is evaluated, and data are classified to select the appropriate migration approach. Moreover, the organization’s infrastructure needs are assessed to select a suitable CSP based on factors such as service offerings, pricing, security and compliance.
• Optimization and Management: This step involves optimizing the utilization of cloud resources in order to minimize costs and maximize efficiency. It also includes implementing Cloud management tools to automate tasks, monitor performance, and manage costs effectively. In addition, continuous monitoring of cloud performance, resources and costs is necessary to identify and promptly address any issues that may arise.
• Cultural Change and Adoption: For an organization to successfully move to Cloud computing, it’s important to educate employees on cloud concepts, technologies and best practices to promote a “cloud-first” mentality. Additionally, employees should have self-service access to cloud resources and services to encourage innovation and experimentation. It’s also crucial to monitor the progress of cloud migration, measure the benefits and evaluate the overall impact on the organization.

Cloud security and Cloud Configuration Assessment (CCA)

Cloud security is the practice of protecting cloud resources from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification or destruction. This includes among others implementing security controls, (access control, encryption, vulnerability management) and a Zero Trust Approach.

Cloud Configuration Assessment (CCA) and Cloud security are interdependent because a secure configuration is crucial for ensuring a safe cloud environment. It is important for organizations to identify and eliminate configuration vulnerabilities to minimize the risk of security breaches. Furthermore, Cloud Configuration Assessment can aid organizations to comply with security regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). More specifically, Neurosoft’s Cloud Configuration reviews and verifies if security best practices are followed and correctly configured, providing an extended knowledge of the Company’s Infrastructure. Neurosoft’s Security Team will identify misconfiguration and missing best practices.

Here are some of the ways in which CCA helps to improve Cloud security:

• CCA can identify misconfigured cloud resources that could be exploited by attackers. By remediating these vulnerabilities, organizations can reduce their attack surface and improve their overall security posture.
• CCA can help organizations to comply with security regulations by identifying and remediating non-compliant configurations. This can help to reduce the risk of audits and fines.
• A secure cloud environment can prevent security breaches that could lead to data loss or downtime, thus reducing cost.
• A secure cloud environment can, also, help organizations to be more agile by decreasing the time and effort required to deploy and manage cloud resources.
• CCA can provide organizations with a better visibility of their cloud environment and the configuration of their resources. This can help them to identify and address security risks more effectively, improving their security posture.
• CCA can be used to automate many of the tasks involved in cloud security, such as vulnerability scanning and configuration management. This can help to free up security teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Is Neurosoft Cloud-ed? From on-premises to multi-cloud environments, from corporate endpoints to remote access from any device and location, from MPLS to xDSL to 5G and beyond, we provide high-end, tailor-made solutions and security awareness training to ensure top-notch security. Neurosoft strive to empower businesses with secure solutions for their cloud transformation journey offering technology innovation with simplicity through Managed Services.