Due to their benefits, cloud modernization and migration have becvome vital to organizational IT and business strategies. Scalability, flexibility, reduced IT costs, automation, and performance improvement are significant reasons businesses are increasingly adopting and accelerating cloud migration.

According to Gartner® 1, “Gartner predicts that by 2027, more than 70% of enterprises will use industry cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives, up from less than 15% in 2023. With this increased use of cloud, organizations must invest more in technology to protect their data, applications, and infrastructure services.” In our view, this finding underscores the importance of security for organizations to protect their data, applications, and infrastructure services when migrating from on-premises environments to the cloud.

In today’s world of heightened security and compliance risk, companies are focusing even more on secure migration and modernization of their business services. Safeguarding migration and modernization efforts by implementing robust security measures protects enterprise data, mitigates ransomware threats, and decreases internal and external social engineering attacks.

Key security concerns during migration and modernization

During cloud migration and modernization, several key security concerns need to be addressed to ensure that data and systems remain protected.

Data privacy, compliance, and access management: Ensuring that data remains private and complies with regulations (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA) is crucial. Organizations must verify that their cloud providers adhere to relevant compliance standards and data protection laws.
Resource access management: Implementing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to ensure access permissions are properly configured and monitored can prevent unauthorized access attempts.
Data security: Protecting data during transit and at rest is essential during migration. Implementing strong encryption protocols, secure access controls, and robust authentication mechanism can protect from internal and external cybersecurity threats.
Vulnerability management: It is vital to identify and address vulnerabilities in the cloud environment. This includes regularly patching systems, using automated security tools, and conducting vulnerability assessments.
Application security: Ensuring that applications running in the cloud are secure involves applying best practices for coding, conducting regular security testing, and implementing application firewalls.
Data migration and configuration management risks: Data can be exposed or lost during the migration process. Ensuring secure transfer mechanisms and verifying data integrity before and after migration is crucial. Similarly, misconfigured cloud resources can lead to security vulnerabilities.

Addressing and alleviating these concerns requires a collaboration of robust security practices and continuous monitoring between IT and security teams.

The importance of secure cloud migration and modernization

By securely modernizing and migrating business services to the cloud, companies can reduce financial risk from capital investments and create agility across technology expenditure. Furthermore, modernization enables increased platform resilience and performance and safeguarding from security breaches. Through modernization, you can optimize your IT investments, tools, and resources with cloud computing and streamline operations to enable more impact with less input. By maintaining a more resilient platform with modernization and cloud migration, your company stays enterprise and future-ready to integrate innovative solutions. Implementing modern applications ensures compatibility with best-in-class threat detection and response tolling to reduce business risk and maintain regulation compliance.

A top global financial services company recruited Virtusa’s expertise in secure migration to help them transition to an Azure hybrid cloud foundation—automating cloud-services provisioning for an Azure landing zone and AKS-hosted environments with vBPaaC and creating policy as a code using Terraform. Virtusa built deployable elements with low code, containers, and reusable patterns leveraging Azure DevOps and Terraform. We helped the client improve cost management with our Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) and Azure solutions. As a result, the client achieved a 90% reduction in full-stack environment provisioning times and detected identification during the development stage. The client also increased platform stability by 85% with shift-left security and restricted access, security policy templates, scripts, and codes.

Securing migration and modernization with Virtusa and Microsoft

With our commitment to understanding the dynamic cloud modernization landscape, Virtusa has developed a long-standing partnership with Microsoft to help clients address modernization, security, and compliance challenges to obtain new growth opportunities. Our solutions are aligned with MS frameworks (Cloud Adoption Frameworks, Well-Architected Frameworks, Zero Trust Architecture) and migration patterns available in the Architecture Library. We have secure advanced specialization in Microsoft cloud secure solutions and are developing joint solutions to help companies secure and migrate the priority business services at scale. Rated as one of the Top Three America’s most Cybersecure Companies by Forbes 2023 , we deliver the same secure cloud migration standards to our customers.

Virtusa has built industry-specific offerings to securely migrate and optimize customers’ top priority workloads, such as Windows Server, SQL Server, Virtual Desktop, VMware, and Open-Source Databases (OSS), to Azure, leveraging Microsoft Cloud’s comprehensive and multilayer security services.

Our BCM (Business Capability Model) led macro and micro assessment allows us to optimize the migration process for our customers at business capability, business process, application, and eventually at the infrastructure level. We assess the current state's security areas (identity, network, infrastructure, application, data, and endpoints) and build a Zero Trust Security (ZTS) complaint target platform that meets the requirements of relevant regulations. We also bring license benefits and leverage hybrid licensing benefits or OSS databases for our customers. Virtusa Migration Factory further industrializes the rationalized applications’ migration process, starting with a strategic business service in a pilot-run initiative.

Virtusa’s proven migration and modernization expertise in various markets across North America, Europe, APAC, and the Middle East enables us to understand the nuances of each geographic market and unique evolving customer demands. From there, we implement our HIVE solutions factory of effective cloud transformation strategies and best-in-class partner tools to scale and speed up your migration and modernization needs. GenAI technologies enable our solutions to extract finer details and lay the foundation for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) blueprints, followed by large-scale high-velocity migration.

A leading Middle East bank partnered with Virtusa to securely modernize and migrate its existing hardware to Azure. Virtusa leveraged the Virtusa Blueprint as a Code (vBPaaC) to implement an enterprise-grade cloud foundation framework and migrated the bank’s 180+ applications from an on-premises data center to Azure.

Virtusa’s trusted partnership with Microsoft enables us to align and innovate on scaling cloud migration and modernization efforts and solutions. Collaborate with us to streamline your business modernization and migration journey while upholding industry security and compliance requirements and adhering to regional and global regulations.

Safeguard and secure your migration and modernization journey with Virtusa and Microsoft Cloud. Contact us to get started.

Learn more about our secure cloud migration and modernization offerings.

[1] Gartner, “The Expanding Enterprise Investment in Cloud Security” Q&A with Lawrence Pingree, June 5, 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

[2] Meet America’s Most Cybersecure Companies 2023 (forbes.com)

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