How can companies consume cloud services in a secure way?

This week McKinsey released an important report called Making a secure transition to the public cloud. According to McKinsey,  80 percent of the companies they studied, plan to have more than 10 percent of their workloads in public-cloud platforms  or plan to double their cloud use in three years. A high rate, which is in sharp contrast with the current percent of cloud users: just 40 percent of the companies McKinsey studied has more than 10 percent of their workloads on public-cloud platforms. This is significantally small if you think about how many 

Why have so many companies still not moved their data to the cloud, despite the well known benefits like scalabilty, lower operation costs and simpler scaling?

Turns out, the main reason for companies to not move to the cloud is cybersecurity. This is what McKinsey says about this:

'In our research on cloud adoption from 2016, executives cited security as one of the top barriers to cloud migration, along with the complexity of managing change and the difficulty of making a compelling business case for cloud adoption.'

What's interesting about this is that companies don't question the security of the cloud itself anymore. They know that most cloud providers have way stronger protection resources than they have themself. No, what they are worried about is the way their existing security practices and architectures will be less effective in the cloud. For example, many on-premise security controlls  like security logging, will need to be reconfigured because they simply don't work in the cloud.

So the question companies have is: How can companies consume cloud services in a secure way?

In McKinsey's full report they give an answer to this question by, as they say themselves, "providing four practices that can help companies develop a consistent, effective approach to public-cloud security".

Besides the practices, the report also gives a 10-step plan for a succesful cloud migration.

In the end, in turns out,  public-cloud adoption can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for IT security, if implemented properly according to the framework McKinsey proposes.

We highly recommend this article for everyone who's still doubting moving its data to the cloud because of security reasons. If you are a Google Cloud user, or if you are thinking about moving your data to the Google Cloud, we recommend these links about cybersecurity and the Google Cloud:

• Google's Infrastructure security 
•  Google's shared responsibility model explained

Do you want to move to the cloud but still have some worries about a secure migration?  Contact Us