How Heavily Regulated Industries Can Migrate Sensitive Data Workloads to the Cloud

[Kathleen Martin]

How improvements in data security and governance are helping heavily regulated industries make the move to the cloud.

• By Nong Li
• October 10, 2022

All too often, companies looking to leverage the cloud and its inherent benefits quickly find themselves at a crossroads. Despite predictions that moving data, applications, and/or other business elements to a cloud computing environment would become the norm across industries, more than half (52 percent) of companies reported that the majority of their applications and data workloads are still residing in on-premises data centers.
For fear they may not have the tools or strategy in place to move sensitive data to a public cloud infrastructure, executives in deeply controlled sectors such as finance, healthcare, insurance, and government began to reconsider earlier plans to migrate sensitive data and workloads to public cloud infrastructures due to compliance concerns and overall risk.
Although those concerns are justified, the reality is that these same organizations still must complete their cloud migrations to leverage their data assets and identify new opportunities. Failure to do so has its own risks and can prevent an organization from capitalizing on the benefits of modern data management approaches, infrastructures, and analytics capabilities.
Moving to the Cloud Is Not Without Its Challenges
Aside from achieving a digital transformation, businesses are also moving to the cloud to conduct analytics at speed, quickly scale artificial intelligence and machine learning initiatives, and reduce CAPEX on hardware. However, migrating to the cloud has created a new set of critical issues, such as how to ensure data security at a fine-grained level to protect personally identifiable information (PII), manage data access and control to ensure only the right people can see certain assets, and remain in compliance with the ever-growing list of global mandates.
Typically, an organization opts to leverage the cloud by applying one of the following migration approaches:

• Cloud only: a company commits to having all of their applications and data in one particular cloud offering
• Multicloud: organizations select the cloud providers based on which are best suited for their architectural, regulatory, and geographic needs
• Hybrid IT: cloud management platforms, private clouds, and remote services are used in coordination with public cloud clusters and enterprise systems

Regardless of the approach taken, transitioning to the cloud has created difficulties that challenge security- and privacy-focused executives, as business leaders too often are left wondering where data is, how well it’s protected, and how they can access it.
Continue reading: https://tdwi.org/articles/2022/10/10/diq-all-migrating-sensitive-data-workloads-to-the-cloud.aspx