Iñaki Urricelqui, Product Manager
8 min read
Embracing the vast benefits of migrating from server to cloud means you’re getting ready to make a transition. However, you know that launching an on-premise to cloud migration comes with risks and challenges.
Although IT migrations happen often, even expert IT leads get nervous when it’s time to make a move, and granted, it entails some unknown variables you’ll need to factor in.
Back when digital transformation first made cloud solutions a viable option, it was a drawn-out, aggravating endeavor. Today, moving your print infrastructure to the cloud can be done in just 10 minutes. So, if time is not the issue anymore, what considerations do you need to make before migrating from server to cloud?
There are multiple considerations and implications that go into a company moving print capabilities to the cloud. Encircling all considerations is the critical need for security excellence, with anything from cloud governance to security infrastructure and data protection.
Read on to discover the essential considerations to make when deciding whether your business should migrate its print infrastructure to the cloud. This post will also uncover key implications for conducting an on-premises to cloud migration. Enjoy!
Top 5 Considerations when Migrating from Server to Cloud
When shifting to the cloud, IT pros like yourself no longer have to spend weekends migrating an entire business to the latest hardware models. It also won't take days to set up your IT infrastructure if you need to move offices. Most importantly, when migrated properly, you can feel confident that data is secure and protected in the cloud.
The benefits of migrating from server to cloud are numerous. Cloud applications support a digital office transformation, giving companies the agility and scalability to transform offices anywhere – and for the heroes in IT, you finally get to let go of print management and refocus your attention on on-mission critical tasks.
Considerations must be made before launching a migration project. When shifting from server to cloud, security is one element that determines whether the migration is successful or not. At the same time, cloud printing provides unparalleled opportunities to mitigate risk, so you’re in good hands.
Hoping to get a real example of considerations for migrating a large-scale print infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud? Here's an example of Mars moving 100K Employees to a cloud print setup.
Let’s go through the 5 major considerations to make when prepping for a cloud transition:
1. IT Infrastructure Security
No one is more aware of the concerns and considerations inherent in digital transformation and cloud-first solutions than IT professionals. For you, moving to the cloud comes with the heavy baggage of change since it affects existing rules, regulations, and compliance policies.
Data protection requirements and other regulations will apply when migrating from server to cloud, so it’s key to be well prepared for rules, regulations, and policies that will be affected once the migration happens.
2. Strict Cloud Governance
To balance an ongoing cloud transformation with control and proactive change management, a strong cloud governance framework is essential. Without it, you can quickly experience increased risks and a lack of visibility and control.
In contrast, by creating and implementing a clear and strategic governance framework, you can balance control and ongoing management with the necessary flexibility to make your on-premise to cloud migration a success.
When managed correctly, migrating to multi tenant SaaS infrastructures open up new possibilities for organizations that allow them to be agile and efficient with their cloud capabilities.
3. Ensure Business Continuity
Whether it be cloud migration of print infrastructures or dealing with the impacts of a major lockdown on a business workflow, being able to maintain functionality with minimal pain is critical. For an IT infrastructure migration to succeed, one of the most important elements is to maintain business continuity throughout the transfer.
For every difficult situation, your business may encounter, having contingency plans prepared means you set your business up for success. In terms of migrating from server to cloud, make sure you have a clearly defined strategy set up to make your print migration a smooth sailing process with next to no inconvenience for your personnel.
Going a step beyond, to ensure your cloud environment is safe and effective at any point, start preparing a business continuity plan post-migration with recovery procedures and data backup ready to go. That way, you can uphold cloud resiliency and start foreseeing possible disruptions to technology service at your business.
4. Hosting and Management
Migrating to the cloud is one thing, but there’s one additional thing to consider. You’ll need to evaluate your current infrastructure and identify the key factors for how it meets your business needs.
After that, ask yourself: What cloud setup best meets those key factors? Is it a private, public, or hybrid cloud infrastructure? Either setup has advantages and drawbacks in flexibility, performance, and security.
Here are some insights into each type of cloud setup:
- Public Cloud: Cloud delivered via the internet and shared across multiple companies. This type of cloud scales quickly and conveniently and is agile for innovation.
- Private Cloud: A cloud environment dedicated uniquely to your company. Private cloud enables greater security controls and higher customisability.
- Hybrid Cloud: Any environment that uses both public and private clouds, or legacy systems with a cloud gateway. This option is great for global control of data, processes, and security. Hybrid cloud comes with minimal security risks, higher flexibility, and is policy-driven.
5. Stay Compliant and Secure Data
Without proper security, cloud transformations can have the potential for large-scale failure, security breaches, and a waterfall of consequences.
But, with few preparations and proactive planning, you’ll quickly learn that a cloud-first setup is much safer than strictly on-premises solutions. More specifically, here are some things to consider about securing data and staying compliant:
- With wars and conflicts happening every day, new digital attack threats are unearthed as new conflicts erupt. There will be a need to stay on top of new threats and utilize security capacities like multi-factor authentication to keep the threats at bay.
- As companies are collecting an increasing amount of sensitive personal data, there are regulations that they must adhere to protect the data they hold. When moving to a cloud infrastructure, you’ll need to consider with caution where your data will reside and what regulations you have to comply with. There are several standards and frameworks to hold your cloud setup accountable, e.g., GDPR, ISO 27001, OWASP, and more.
- Cloud solutions are created with security at the heart of development. As an example, our cloud software has been created with security excellence at its core. With devotion to protecting our customers’ data, we’ve created a product that keeps your data protection at the top of the priority list – and your data safer than any other accessible solution.
- Cloud environments are agile and dynamic, which means enforcing protection policies can be hard. With hybrid workplaces, IT professionals have to concoct a unique security mixture with cloud-native security topped off with multi-factor authentication to make residing on the cloud a safe and comfortable experience.
If there’s one thing IT heads will need to consider when conducting an on-premise to cloud migration, it’s that the variety of risks affecting print is on the increase. Do you want to learn more about the future of print security? In this article, we’ve listed 8 key predictions that can help your company stay on top of the heap and thrive in print security.
📖 Read on → 10 Ways to Maintain a Secure Cloud Print Environment
On a more promising note, with a cloud service set up and ready to go, your security tasks will always be properly prioritized, and reaction times will be faster than ever.
Also, with all the considerations in mind, remember that a cloud setup offers a lot of value in terms of flexibility in your now-digital office, as it comes with a great promise of serverless computing, mobile activation, and remote/hybrid solutions.
Key Implications of Cloud Migration
In terms of the conclusions that can be drawn from the considerations above, here are the actions your IT team needs to achieve a successful on-prem to cloud migration:
1. Make Migration Resiliency a First Priority
Get relevant security control policies and procedures in place before switching to the cloud. Also, define a cloud resiliency plan to ensure business continuity, i.e., determine your business’ uptime requirements with recovery plans, internet connection reliability, and a solid backup plan to ensure you mitigate risks from the get-go.
Here, a key implication is to adopt a zero-trust print approach where you verify explicitly, use least privileged access, and assume breach. Anticipating that failure will happen means failure happens a lot less.
2. Be Prepared for the Post-Migration Setup
Your post-migration setup will look very different from your pre-migration setup. To ensure data protection, make sure you’ve determined regulatory compliance requirements when processing, storing, and transmitting data.
To make sure your post-migration setup comes with resiliency and security, here are some tips on first priorities after the migration:
- Verify the integrity of migrated data
- Review personnel registries to the cloud
- Make sure you have data backups in place
- Review that all security requirements are met
3. Flexible Hosting & Consistent Management
Take time to examine the market and make sure you opt for a hosting strategy that is flexible in the way you need it to be. Success is an option only if you have made the proper preparations on your side, checking that your infrastructure is, in fact, migratable.
If the final cloud architecture isn’t working how you hoped, chances are that it’s an internal issue rather than an issue with the architecture. Either is plausible, so devote time to ensure everything is ready internally in advance. Many cloud migrations that miss the target just need to be reassessed and then launched back into the cloud with a higher probability of success.
Once the migration is done, it’s important to ensure consistent management of your cloud infrastructure across multiple locations. What management tasks will be managed by your cloud provider, and what actions do you need to complete? You’ll need to prepare for the fact that managing apps in the cloud requires a different set of IT and management skills.
6 Security Pillars for a Protected Cloud Setup
To keep cloud estates protected and secure, Check Point, a leader in cyber security, has discovered 6 pillars for robust cloud security beyond the cloud-native security features and services offered by cloud providers in any niche:
- Policy-based authentication controls across cloud infrastructures
- Zero-trust cloud security controls across logically isolated networks
- Enforcement of virtual server protection policies and processes
- Protecting all applications with a next-generation firewall
- Enhanced data protection and encryption
- Threat intelligence that detects and fights threats in real-time
No matter what security elements you bring into your cloud-first strategy you can count on cloud security being a responsibility that is shared between the cloud provider and the customer. So, your cloud solution should come with some security already integrated.
Migrating from Server to Cloud with SAFEQ Cloud
Having a cloud setup that’s thoroughly protected is paramount – you probably already knew that since security has reached an all-time high momentum when talking about cloud migration.
At Y Soft, our SAFEQ Cloud facilitates IT leads everywhere with a print setup that migrates both the print task and the management of print to a cloud infrastructure, all with a security-first approach.
As a mature cloud provider, Y Soft had a unique opportunity to stand prepared as the market matured in the last 10 years. Instead of having to focus on fast launches and grabbing market shares, we’ve been able to analyze the market intensively. As such, we quickly realized that security will be a key concern as businesses initiate their digital transformations.
With our SAFEQ Cloud, security comes first. After that, comes quality assurance and user experience metrics needed to create software our customers can enjoy using.
No matter how you look at it, it has to be safe first. SAFEQ Cloud is a multi-tenant application, which allows us to seamlessly integrate new prerequisite protection standards for all cloud users in the same organization without additional costs. This way, cloud resiliency, and security are achievable and cheaper.
Here’s all you need to know about security with SAFEQ Cloud:
- Y Soft makes security part of our platform's DNA
- SAFEQ Cloud is designed for zero-trust requirements
- We have comprehensive Incident Management and Major Incident Management procedures in place
- Service level information is published on our website including real-time information on system performance and interruption to overall service
- With SAFEQ Cloud, advanced end-to-end encryption governs your data
- We ensure that your data in the cloud is secure according to best practices, governmental standards, and local legislation
- Y Soft is certified under ISO 27001 (Data security)
- SAFEQ Cloud upholds standards of security from SOC 2, OWASP, CAIQ/CCM, and GDPR
FAQs on On-Premise to Cloud Migration
Q1) What is the Risk of Migrating to the Cloud?
Migrating from server to cloud can open your business to a variety of security risks, from compliance violations and data breaches to insecure APIs, accidental errors, external attacks, and more. Also, when moving workloads and assets from on-prem to the cloud, organizations forfeit a certain level of visibility into online operations.
Being well-prepared means opportunities outweigh the risks. It is essential that businesses take all major considerations into account and set themselves up for higher success with a migration plan in action.
Q2) How Long does it take to Migrate to the Cloud?
Migrating from server to cloud with inexperienced software can take days, if not more. With resilient and mature (born in the cloud) software like SAFEQ Cloud, migrating takes no longer than 10 minutes to complete. To make your print migration simple and effective, we offer a free trial as well as demos to set your company up for cloud resiliency and success.
Get a personalized demo → Start the demo here
Final Points
Moving to the cloud, thereby taking the next step in your digital transformation, is a great idea. With just a short time frame for drawbacks, you’ll soon notice an ocean of opportunity for your business to work with higher flexibility, less disruption, and proactivity at its core.
To make security one less thing to worry about, make sure you’re informed of the latest cyber security insights. Want to learn more? These are the latest cybersecurity trends to keep in check:
