Five years ago, almost every organization on earth appeared to be just weeks away from moving all workloads into the cloud—or at least it seemed that way. But reality has moved at a far more measured pace. Instead of a ubiquitous, all-in phenomenon, most organizations turned to a cloud-ish approach in which many new applications are developed on the cloud, but most older apps and infrastructure either stay put or have long-term migration plans. So, the promise of moving to the cloud is alive and well; it’s just happening in slow motion. This means:
- Almost everyone is new at this.
- Developers are expecting to be unencumbered by organizational process.
- Technology changes from month to month.
The combination of these factors creates a situation that is simultaneously exciting for organizations as they reap the benefits of the agility cloud solutions provide, and disconcerting because they are inexperienced with the cloud. These positive and negative tensions have generated several myths about and around shifting business operations to the cloud.
- Myth 1: The cloud is unsafe
- Myth 2: My organization doesn’t use the cloud
- Myth 3: My cloud provider will keep me secure
- Myth 4: The cloud is just someone else’s computer
- Myth 5: Advanced adversaries aren’t attacking the cloud
The cloud brings great promise of allowing organizations to do more with less, democratizing resources so that startups can enjoy the same capabilities as juggernauts of industry, and allowing apps to grow to a scale not seen before. But this means that cloud resources require dedicated, specialized attention to ensure they are not being misused and that their data stays secure. Organizations must keep up with security tools and training they need to ensure that they are ready for the big shift.