Businesses are enthusiastically migrating their operations to the cloud today. The benefits of doing so are manifold – enhanced scalability, cost-effectiveness, and the ability to innovate at lightning speed. But amidst this headlong rush to embrace the future, there's a crucial pillar we mustn't overlook: compliance.
Often seen as a burden, compliance can be an accelerating force for your cloud migrations if employed mindfully and strategically. This was the topic of discussion in our recent webinar, Accelerating cloud migration for comprehensive visibility and continuous controls monitoring.
Why compliance matters in cloud migration
Compliance is commonly seen as a checkbox exercise, a ‘cost of doing business’ that every organization must adhere to. While this is very often true, we look at compliance a bit differently, focusing on the continuous monitoring and evidence collection aspects of the GRC lifecycle and creating always-on assurance that the organization remains compliant as it undertakes these initiatives.
“This is also about compliance being a part of the actual value stream that your organization is trying to create,” said Sean Catlett, GM EMEA at JupiterOne. “We don't want compliance to be a blocker.”
When planning for a cloud migration, organizations should consider compliance matters up front, specifically for these reasons:
- Guardian of your reputation. Compliance isn't just about adhering to a set of rules — it's about upholding your company's reputation. A breach, especially one that could've been prevented by following regulatory guidelines, can be detrimental. It's more than just a financial blow; it's a trust issue. Compliance ensures you're safeguarded from such pitfalls.
- Enhanced data protection. With stories of data breaches making headlines, your clients and stakeholders want the assurance that their information is safe. Regulatory bodies worldwide have developed stringent data protection regulations, ensuring businesses prioritize data security when migrating to the cloud.
- Future-proofing operations. Compliance is an evolving field. What's acceptable today might change tomorrow. When your business aligns with compliance guidelines, it becomes adept at anticipating and adapting to these changes. This is not just beneficial — it's essential for long-term survival.
That last item, continuous and ongoing compliance, is incredibly important, not just for future adjustments but also for day-to-day operations. During the webinar, James Mountifield, Director, Technical Solutions, EMEA at JupiterOne, described the process for continuous compliance monitoring JupiterOne enables:
“We do that through a mechanism called alerting, and it's essentially having the system take these controls and actually run them on a continuous basis, whether that's once a week, once a day, every hour, whatever you need, whatever the criticality of that is, and basically start interrogating your environment continuously and in an automated fashion with really powerful integrations downstream.”
Cloud compliance enhancements in JupiterOne
Cloud providers, recognizing the urgency of the matter, are introducing innovative features and tools designed specifically to streamline your compliance journey. All of these features are already present in JupiterOne, built on the complete asset inventory and visibility available within the platform:
- Real-time monitoring. Monitor your assets 24/7, ensuring immediate detection of any compliance deviations.
- Automated compliance checks. Automation is the buzzword, and for a good reason. Automatically check for, report on, and mitigate compliance deviations.
- Tailored compliance blueprints. Different industries have different compliance needs. Take advantage of customized templates catering to the regulatory frameworks specific to your industry.
Accelerate your cloud migrations
We’ve been focused mostly on the compliance aspect of the topic, but how does a compliance approach help make cloud migrations happen faster? James answered this question rather succinctly during the webinar.
“Coming back to the topic of cloud migration, one of the bits of feedback we hear quite often from potential customers or existing customers is this is a process or initiative that they would look at after they finish their migration work,” he said. “But in reality, this is something that you really want in place before you start. You don't want to complete a cloud migration of a production workload to Azure, come in and start evaluating the environment and find lots of gaps and not be able to determine whether these are new or whether these are things that are just exposed post migration. There's a huge amount of value in having these controls defined before these change processes start so that you can, act, run these questions, and get the feedback all the way through that process.”
If you’d like to learn more, including examples of some specific queries you can run in JupiterOne to help accelerate your cloud migrations in a compliant manner, the full webinar is available on-demand on our website.
