Lift and Shift Complicated Local Workloads to the Cloud Without Rearchitecting Network Structures or Compromising Security

Lift and Shift Complicated Local Workloads to the Cloud Without Rearchitecting Network Structures or Compromising Security

One of the biggest challenges when a company moves their entire infrastructure to to the cloud is how to handle the problem of units and divisions that each have their own IT departments and networks. Sometiems these technical divisions are the product of sloppy processes; but other times they emerge from legitimate needs. Units in physically separated locations or working with fundamentally different business use cases often find it easier to run their own IT department, and they want to move to the cloud without being forced to rearchitect every piece of their system and build it into a monolithic whole.

Best practice; defined by DevOps, FinOps, CloudOps, security, audit teams, and industry standards, is to carefully control a cloud deployment and have each teams directly report to a central authority. This is is often unappealing for large companies who have come to rely on smaller teams with a high degree of autonomy and independence. They understand there is a safer, more respected way to manage tech; but legacy systems, new divisions, and other edge cases at that occur with large companies complicate following guidelines.

Legacy operations may be forced to run outdated, potentially insecure software that is supported by a unique team of developers who understand. This legacy system is often intentionally walled off from the rest of the company. Complicated physical industries, such as manufacturing or pharmaceuticals, often rely on older network controlled machines that are prohibitively expensive to replace when software is no longer directly supported. Companies that deal with massive legacy data sets, such as financial services or insurance companies, cannot easily replicate the business logic of hundreds of thousands of reports in a a new analytics platform.

Specialized, newer units inside of larger companies are often run as internal startups. They are given a budget, a goal, and free rein to do what they want to do. As long as they adhere to some basic reporting and auditing guidelines they achoose the tech stack that works best for them. This is often a key part of their success; they are allowed to pick the hardware and software that makes the most sense, and all they need to worry about the most general regulations and financial controls. Segregation of the new server stack from the old production stack means the new team doesn’t have to fight with outdated software, meet privacy standards that don’t apply to them, or comply with stringent documentation requirements.

Keeping these types of departments separate is often impossible with a migration to the cloud. Cloud systems are inherently more connected than physically separated systems. Attacks that in the past had limited vectors out can now move from a small, quasi-independent piece of a company to the larger whole through shared services. Attacks that target a satellite IT team can spread exponentially with just a few mistakes. This forces companies to apply older, more bureaucratic standards to newer, purposefully agile teams when they move to the cloud, and divisions that have established, sometimes decades old procedures now have to subject them to security review and revision.

Budget concerns also force companies to take authority away from smaller unit directors. Budgets tied to physical servers and devices are much easier to follow—and spending is much easier to control—than spending on AWS or Azure. Cloud spend is only limited by software and judgement; a production member with the right permissions can spend a year’s budgets in minutes with a single mistake. Leaving individual budgets in place, no matter how much a smaller team may want to, opens the company up to millions of dollars in liability.

Moving a company into the cloud that has previously been run with siloed, fresh teams forces some significant changes—even if the architecture is translated one to one from physical hardware to software, the new financial, security, and business concerns that come with a cloud deployment force cultural and operational changes that can be just as significant as a major technological change.

Companies should always have a more centralized cloud environment as a gaol. Cenmtralization with teams that directly oversee negotiation of terms and service deployment unlocks huge cost savings and productivity gains. But, for many companies the immediate need to deal with the challenge of moving what they have as is with as litlte disruption to a functional structure as possible.

When faced with the problem of moving divided teams into the cloud most companies will either delay and lose the benefits of the cloud, or take a significant short term hit by breaking down siloed divisions before the business has developed to the stage where the change makes sense.

With IAM Health Cloud companies don’t have to make this choice—they can get all of the benefits of the cloud without the downside of making large organizational changes. IAM Health Cloud actively polls every Azure and AWS account and organization that belongs to a company and provides real time, actively polled data on security risks, cost, access, usage, in a single pane of glass. Dynamic dashboards, open source data import and export, and intelligent integration with natural language models give quick looks into problems the minute they begin and provide road maps to fast solutions.

No other product, native or otherwise, can do this.

This allows companies to exactly reproduce their infrastructure in the cloud and leave it in control of the current team. Instead of combining everything, organizations can choose to give each department their own cloud services account or organization to manage—just like they would a physical server. A single pane of glass with alerts can easily keep track of everything without forcing employees to send and request reports.

IAM Health Cloud gives companies moving to the cloud breathing room to leave their divisions intact without exposing themselves to additional security and financial threats. We provide a central place to look at and understand everything all at once at once. Companies can take the time reshape organizations after their move to the cloud, not during it.

If you are interested in learning more, please reach out today. Thank you!