Barracuda

Security, Access and Reliability for Cloud-Connected Networks and Applications

Five steps to the cloud - a series by Rich Turner

This blog series by Rich Turner details five foundational steps to successfully migrate workloads to the public cloud.


Five steps to the cloud – Introduction
First step in cloud migration – Preparation
Second step in cloud migration – Strategy
Third step in cloud migration – Qualification
Fourth step in cloud migration – Security
Fifth step in cloud migration – Move and build

You can read more from Rich Turner on his blog here and connect with him on LinkedIn here.

Fifth step in cloud migration – move and build

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This is the fifth in a multi-part series. Follow the series here.

Once all the security pieces are in place, cloud deployments can begin. In nearly all cases, we’ve seen customers migrating gradually. They do a proof-of-concept, then migrate their first workload. If they’ve followed the steps in our earlier blogs, this first migration is a success, it is secure, and it performs as expected.

Companies then begin more significant migrations. Using the framework reference architecture they’re already created for the first migration, virtually any VM that’s running on-premises is a candidate for deployment in the cloud. To oversimplify things, the cloud can be thought of as a way to run VMs on someone else’s hardware.

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Fourth step in cloud migration – security

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This is the fifth in a multi-part series. Follow the series here.

It’s almost redundant to say, but once you’ve chosen and qualified your security framework architecture, you need to deploy it before you actually migrate workloads.

There are two different (but related) security solutions that companies migrating to the cloud consider.  One is a Web Application Firewall, and this protects web-facing applications.

The Web Application Firewall or WAF is considered a Level 7 security solution:  in addition to protecting a web-accessible workload from OWASP top-10 attacks and DDoS attacks, it also manages access, and prevents outgoing data loss. 

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Third step in cloud migration – qualification

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This is the fourth in a multi-part series. Follow the series here.

In this installment, we’ll look at qualification.  Since Barracuda is a cloud security provider, our discussions will naturally focus on security considerations.  When we talk about qualification, we’re really talking about two things that can go hand-in-hand:  a proof-of-concept, and a framework reference architecture. 

The Shared Responsibility Model means that while your cloud provider will ensure rock-solid security for AWS, you’ll need something additional in front of your cloud-resident applications and workloads to secure them from attacks and be able to monitor and log activity.

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Second step in cloud migration – strategy

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This is the third in a multi-part series. Follow the series here.

Strategy might seem the first logical step in a cloud deployment, but it goes hand-in-hand with the preparation step – and often needs to be revisited after companies have determined how they want to leverage the cloud.

Strategy is as broad as a company wants to make it.  It also presents a more nuanced view of cloud – hybrid strategies.  Unless a company is a ground-up brand-new start-up, they are already running their infrastructure somewhere.  Hybrid is merely describing a combination of infrastructures:  what currently exists, and what will exist in the cloud.

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First step in cloud migration – preparation

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Visit Barracuda this week at
AWS re:Invent 2016 – Las Vegas
Booth #2215 in re:Invent Central
Details here

This is the second in a multi-part series. Follow the series here.

Migration might seem to be a strange term when it comes to leveraging the public cloud, but most companies already have applications running either on-premises or in hosted data centers. There are a number of immediate benefits if those apps are migrated to a public cloud:

• There’s little to no re-coding involved
• User access to those applications or workloads will remain similar or the same
• The cloud is more flexible, resilient, and less expensive to use than hosted or on-premises servers

Because of this, the migration of existing workloads is how most companies begin their cloud journey.

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Five steps to the cloud – Introduction

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Five steps to the cloud – a multi-part blog on best practices for companies migrating to the Public Cloud

Barracuda has become one of the leading security vendors in both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services – our security has made successful migrations possible for thousands of customers, ranging from SMB customers who’ve provisioned and deployed their entire cloud infrastructure from the marketplaces to Fortune 500 customers who’ve engaged top-tier consultants to migrate entire datacenters.

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