COVID-19 cemented the cloud as a significant part of modern business.
The Internet of Things (IoT), analytics, remote working practices, automation and data access all highlight the importance of cloud to digitalisation. What’s more, disaster recovery and backup are already being fulfilled via the cloud for a growing number of companies.
Making the cloud more secure
But how do you balance the benefits of cloud technology with the security risks? Concern about handing over your data to outside operations is understandable for all businesses, particularly when it also involves the transport of your data to and from their platforms.
When your business is migrating critical assets, data and applications to the cloud, you should know it’s done safely and securely. You should also be certain your organisation’s data in the cloud – and the management of that data – is in compliance with all relevant security and data privacy laws, regulations and standards.
Migration services can help you move applications and data from your IT environment to the cloud, to traditional hosting, or from one cloud environment to another. You can incorporate specific requirements around modernisation, security enhancement, risk reduction or other criteria.
Assessing the risk
A cloud security strategy assessment can help you develop security protocols designed specifically for the cloud. It can identify vulnerabilities before a security incident occurs and create a risk-aware programme to help you through each stage of the process.
An effective assessment will help your business comply with key regulatory requirements while protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your resources and data workloads.
You’ll also be able to establish appropriate risk management strategies, no matter the cloud security service model, and extend controls beyond on-premises environments with governance and assurance.
Making the right connection
Your connection to the cloud, whether private or public, needs to be highly secure.
With most organisations adopting a hybrid mixture of on-premise, private and public cloud, connectivity is becoming an integral part of their operations.
Many companies will need to rely on a blend of fixed, mobile, 4G/5G, broadband and internet. It’s important to get the right connectivity for the right service.
For example, with public clouds such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS, a service such as Vodafone Cloud Connect provides a secure, private connection with lower latency and consistent bandwidth directly from your corporate wide area network.
With safe, secure, high-performance connections to public cloud providers, your business can enjoy operational agility, better-connected employees and stronger customer engagement. and because it is an on-demand service your business can scale capacity as needed.
This provides cost-effective flexibility without the risks of public internet or management of complicated dedicated lines.
Is your network up to the job?
With the adoption of more cloud-based services and applications, your business needs a network that can keep up.
SD-WAN provides a network for your business with an ‘overlay’ virtual solution that can be placed on top of your existing WAN. It gives your network intelligence, immediate visibility and control of network traffic and helps your business respond quickly to changes and external threats.
Our SD-WAN offering allows you to reliably connect offices, workplaces or branches and cloud services. It’s guaranteed by service level agreements from location-to- location and centralised application policies that are controlled through our portal.
