Express Migration to Cloud - High Level Overview

Express Migration of Business to Cloud
A quick overview of the most critical steps to digitize your business in the least amount of time.

The new reality of running business remotely is here. Those early adopters who invested into cloud infrastructures and applications in past decade are now reaping the benefits. COVID-19 had opened an opportunity for many IT departments to expand their budgets and boost cloud migration projects. Furthermore, many XaaS providers are giving discounts for migration to cloud today. Therefore, we are standing at the tipping point between work on-premises and work remotely.

I consider myself lucky to work with both types of businesses, those who invested in cloud technologies and those who kept pushing it off till critical mass is reached and risks are minimal. COVID-19 is an amazing stress test on IT infrastructures and security systems that I had a pleasure to build over the years.

If your company is small to medium size business and you are looking to migrate its core IT operations into the cloud within short period of time, then I’m afraid I’ll have to shatter your pink dreams. It’s not done over night right just before government forces your business to work from home. However, if you are full of ambition highly efficient individual who thinks that dreams can be made real, then I’ll share very high level road map that may help you move your IT operations to cloud within days depending on resources available to you.

When service availability stands between shutting down or work from home, three key areas that should be considered in most cases: Security, Infrastructure, Productivity Tools.

SECURITY

Segment your environments prior to moving core services
- Create multiple networks for DMZ, PRODUCTION, and other environments. Do not deploy all system in one network and hope for host-based firewalls to protect you.
- Block all but authorized ports and/or applications between those environments through firewall or other means available through your cloud provider.
Enforce Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
- Cloud providers are much more secured than many on-premises data centers; however, major weakness that hackers go for are user accounts. (according to ISC2 “Cloud Security Risks – and How to Mitigate Them” white paper). MFA will significantly help you to mitigate those risks.
Spend few hours and read over security best practices for the IaaS provider of your choice.
Good idea is to invest in tool that will keep you informed about infrastructure security posture. IaaS providers may provide them at small incremental cost.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Prepare your new Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Think through IP addressing. Make it logical and intuitive. Well planed network addressing will help you when you get to hardening your network security in the future.
- Establish proper peering between networks or configure virtual firewall appliance to do all traffic routing.
Remove or ignore junk.
- I follow simple rule: full refresh must be done every 5-10 years.
- Pushing it for longer may leave you with no upgrade path for software and hardware being incompatible with newest software.
ID your critical business systems and migrate them. Cloning is fine for now; you’ll clean up and upgrade later if you had no choice but bring in junk.
- This will be your most expensive piece of work, so plan the capacity and do not over spec your VMs.
- Always remember that you are converting your CapEx into an OpEx, so your OpEx has to be reasonable.
There is a ton of either free or very cheap SaaS solutions for non essential services. They will help you get started with cloud with minimal budget.
Take advantage of the change process and enhance your security where possible.
- Patch systems
- Move to more secure protocols
- Remove questionable and obsolete applications

PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS

Transition to Software as a Service (SaaS) productivity tools may be done parallel to infrastructure migration.
Hardest transition will be for email service, as some employees can’t live a life if they do not check it every 15 minutes.
- If you maintained your environment well, then it’ll be a quick transition;
- If not, prepare for a lot of troubleshooting and clean up, or live with down time.
Use web applications as much as possible, especially for email client. It’ll drastically reduce the number of support cases for your Help Desk.
- You may hear arguments like “What if Internet breaks? How am I going to access the application?” Most of the businesses rely on Internet 99.99% of time and if it “breaks” then…

CONCLUSION

Above roadmap is only provided for reference. Depending on the organization size, complexity and criticality, moving to the cloud and enabling full-time home offices may take anywhere from couple days to weeks.

From my personal experience with very messy and neglected Infrastructures and limited resources available it takes between 6 months to a year. Frequently, many businesses seek professional help when their technology is in rough shape and large investments must be made to bring it to the level where small team can comfortably run it without involvement of external consultants.