Many companies have already transitioned to the cloud, while others are still planning their cloud migration. But data integrity, intellectual property, and customer data are often at risk during the transition to third-party hosted services. Many organizations work around this by using a hybrid infrastructure. In a hybrid environment, the most sensitive data is kept in-house while day-to-day operations take place in the cloud.
Migrating to the cloud can be a challenge for many businesses. Some vendors provide extensive integration to make it simple. For example, Office 365 is designed to sync with Active Directory to make migration as painless as possible. Moving a custom application may take additional time and effort. While this time and effort may be costly, the cost of migrating to the cloud is often offset by the reduced resource and hosting costs in the long term.
For some organizations, moving to the cloud may present challenges regarding data residency. Data residency refers to the physical location of data and documents. In the case of cloud computing, the physical cloud servers determine data residency, but a cloud provider’s servers are often spread across many locations. You must consider the data residency rules and requirements for both the locations in which you operate and the locations of your cloud service provider’s data centers.