As digital transformation has accelerated to support remote work, how do you secure on premise and hybrid SharePoint environments as you transition to the cloud to ensure consistent access, sharing and security policies? This is the question on every Chief Information Officer, Chief Technology Officer and senior IT professionals’ mind on a daily basis (or at least weekly!).
Cloud is no longer a future aspiration, it’s an urgent mandate. Cloud is an essential requirement for digital transformation. The global disruption via the COVID-19 pandemic has reemphasized the fundamental value of systems resilience, agility, adaptability, and scalability. Enterprises have no choice but to try to figure out the uncertainty by sustaining operations under severe disruption, flexing with volatile customer demand, and managing a massively accelerated shift to new ways of remote and digital working
The key to accelerating the value you get from the cloud and lowering the risk to getting there is to know where you’re headed—and why. Rushed migrations without a clear strategy for realizing value, incomplete planning, or poor execution can end up costing the enterprise more, especially when older legacy applications are overlooked and continue to rack up consumption costs.
So where could your cloud migration be taking your business? There are two important goals. The first is to improve the efficiency and resilience of IT systems. Most enterprises know they don’t belong in the data center business, and they can realize significant cost savings by using new architectures or new applications in the cloud.
Second, the scalability of the cloud is also vital in managing supply shocks, demand volatility and other disruptive events. This will always be a value driver of cloud migration, but all the more so as enterprises manage the uncertain economics of the post-COVID world.
8 Rs for SharePoint Cloud Migration Success
According to Accenture, there are 7 R’s of where digital transformation meets the new cloud strategy, basically where the rubber meets the road:
- Retire the applications you simply don’t need anymore.
- Retain on-premises applications that are too complex or costly to migrate.
- Rehost applications quickly in the cloud.
- Re-platform applications that need to run on a different operating system in the cloud.
- Replace applications for which better and/or cheaper SaaS solutions are available.
- Refactor applications that need significant code and rework for the cloud, decoupling from other systems as needed.
- Reimagine business processes to take advantage of cloud, often by redefining and enhancing core value propositions.
I would also add an 8th R to the list.
- Review content to make sure it’s properly tagged and classified before you bring it over to the Cloud. This will make it infinitely easier to ensure sensitive content can be identified and secured in the Cloud, and ensure it’s protected on all platforms.
All of this adds up to building business resilience in the new way of working which leads to digital transformation. Crawl, walk, run and get some low hanging fruit for some quick wins and build some momentum and at the end of the day, make sure you have the right tools, software and team to support such an endeavor.
Speaking of the right tools, consider using a third party data scanning and protection product like NC Protect to help get your data in order before migrating to the Cloud. If you’ve been a little slack on your data classification and governance it can help you identify sensitive data, classify it and protect it in SharePoint on -premises. Those classifications and protection can also be used in the Cloud to ensure data migrated to your SharePoint Online environment is secure on day 1.
If you plan to have a hybrid environment during your transition, or permanently, it will help you ensure you have consistent data access and protection policies and controls in both environments.
Get Tips for a Successful SharePoint Cloud Migration in this Webinar with MVP Jeff Willinger
Watch our on-demand webinar featuring Microsoft MVP Jeff Willinger. Jeff and our team will explore how to get you ready for your transition to the cloud, and best practices and tools to prepare and secure your sensitive data for a seamless transition.
