Looking ahead, organizations like yours will increasingly migrate to the cloud in service of their business goals. Gartner predicts more than seven in 10 enterprises will leverage the cloud to build momentum behind their business initiatives by 2027, for example. As a means of comparison, fewer than 15% of enterprises expressed this same intent just four years earlier.
What's driving this change? The answer in part rests with what's motivating organizations to navigate to the cloud in the first place. Let's take a closer look below.
The benefits of moving to the cloud
In embracing cloud migration, organizations like yours can enjoy several advantages. Here are just a few of them.
Improved resiliency and availability
Cloud service providers' Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings feature an element of redundancy by design, which increases the resiliency and availability of your cloud-based systems. By comparison, if you want this same level of fault tolerance in an on-premises environment, you must invest in supplemental tools.
Heightened speed and flexibility
You can potentially move faster in the cloud. This is because it helps to remove equipment procurement cycles. Your IT teams can quickly experiment with solutions and shut down those you don't need based on your changing business requirements — all without committing to capital investments over the long term.
Simplified, trusted security settings
Finally, you can simplify your security efforts by migrating to the cloud. All cloud platforms feature security settings tested and validated by professionals, which removes the guesswork from what you need to do to secure your cloud-based assets. Additionally, many cloud vendor marketplaces offer tested security solutions, sparing you the time and effort of needing to build comparable capabilities on your own. Such is true of CIS Hardened Images®; the Center for Internet Security® (CIS®) has securely configured cloud-based operating systems for you by pre-hardening these virtual machine images to the CIS Benchmarks™.
Contextualizing security in your cloud migration plan
The issue with many cloud migration attempts is that organizations don't always place sufficient emphasis on security and compliance. As a result, they struggle to protect their data upon moving into the cloud. IBM reported that 40% of breaches in 2024 exposed information distributed across multiple environments like public clouds and private clouds. It also found that data breaches in the public cloud cost an average of $5.17 million, surpassing the average cost of a data breach in general that year at $4.88 million.
These findings highlight the importance of ensuring that your cloud provider not only complies with all the regulations that are relevant to your organization and industry but can also provide evidence validating its compliance. You also need adopt a security-first mindset, which entails configuring your organization's infrastructure and apps in a way that aligns to compliance requirements and security best practices. As an example, with respect to the transmission and storage of data, you can confirm where it's encrypted as well as review your access controls and unauthorized duplication measures. You need to review these security best practices both during the migration processes and once you've moved to the cloud.
Taking a secure approach to cloud migration
To protect your cloud-based assets, your organization must consider security and compliance when planning your cloud migration journey. You might not know how to start, however.
In the following white paper, CIS demystifies the process by providing an overview of your options for moving to the cloud. It then discusses how your organization can use the CIS Hardened Images and other resources to structure your cloud migration around security and compliance. It concludes by identifying specific measures you can use to lay a secure foundation in the cloud.
Ready to get started?
