Cloud migrations made simpler: Safe, Secure and Successful Migrations

Kyle Wickert, Worldwide Solution Architect, and Yitzy Tannenbaum, Product Marketing Manager, discuss software-defined networks (SDN). As network security moves from a traditional perimeter model to a more granular software-defined model, find out how to simplify network complexity when migrating to SDN.

Migrating applications to the cloud or another data center– without creating security holes or causing application outages– is far easier said than done. For starters, mapping existing application flows across complex enterprise environments pre-migration – which is critical in order to re-establish the correct traffic flows post-migration – is extremely difficult. A single mistake can cause outages, compliance violations and create holes in your security perimeter. Moreover, cloud security architecture is fundamentally different from physical networks, making it extremely difficult to translate application connectivity flows to the cloud security controls, and then manage network security policies cohesively across the entire hybrid enterprise environment. All in all, migrating applications is a complex, tedious and error-prone process that takes months and often compromises security, compliance and business agility.

There are many processes involved in migrating applications to the cloud, however network security is often neglected. When this happens, applications are deployed in the cloud with inadequate security and compliance measures in place, or conversely the security team steps in and halts the migration process. This white paper presents a structural approach for bridging this network security gap before and during the process of migrating applications, that gives security team the essential groundwork needed to prepare for a secure migration process to the cloud.

It’s common for people to imagine that business applications can be beamed up, Star Trek style, into the cloud – the IT team just needs to press a few buttons and whoosh, the migration is done.  If only it were that easy:  In this post, I’m going to cover some of the obstacles that need to be overcome when migrating applications to the cloud.