Migrating to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) requires extensive planning to ensure sensitive data is correctly identified, protected, and transferred. While an AI data security platform like Velotix streamlines data access, simplifies compliance, and makes unlocking your data’s full potential easier, its success depends greatly on organizational policies and best practices focusing on security and efficient resource utilization.
These essential best practices ensure your organization maximizes the cloud’s benefits and minimizes potential disruptions or risks that can compromise the migration process.
Data Discovery
An effective Google Cloud migration relies on a thorough data assessment involving the discovery of data classification and identification of where sensitive data resides. By identifying data classification or type, be it personal, confidential, or public, you can determine which security measures and compliance requirements are necessary for a successful migration. This critical step should also include reviewing existing organizational data policies to ensure they align with Google Cloud’s security protocols and are well-maintained and applied consistently throughout the migration.
Determining Required Changes
The decision to rehost, replatform, repurchase, or redesign applications for Google Cloud should be guided by the nature of the existing applications and the desired outcomes.
- Rehosting, or “lift-and-shift,” is suitable for quick migrations with minimal changes.
- Replatforming makes slight modifications for cloud optimization.
- Repurchasing means switching to a cloud-native application.
- Redesigning is building applications from scratch to fully exploit cloud capabilities.
Each approach requires careful consideration of how permissions are managed to ensure secure access to data.
Mapping Dependencies and Crafting a Security Plan
Understanding how data and various applications in your IT infrastructure are interlinked—and how they will translate to a cloud environment—is essential to creating a comprehensive security plan that addresses these dependencies.
The plan should:
- Focus on developing robust access controls and data protection strategies.
- Include a detailed analysis of permission management to control who has access to what data.
- Ensure consistent application of organizational policies to maintain data integrity and security.
Creating an Infrastructure
A broad migration plan that sets up the necessary cloud resources and ensures they align with your organization’s security and operational requirements ensures an optimal outcome of the migration process.
This typically includes things like network settings, storage options, establishing stakeholder collaboration, computing resources, and ensuring security, performance, scalability, and compliance. Integrating security measures into the infrastructure design, such as encryption, multi-factor authentication, and policy-based access control to protect data during and after the migration, is essential to safeguard data and comply with regulatory standards.
Migration and Validation
During the GCP migration and validation stage, data and applications are transferred to Google Cloud using advanced GCP cloud migration tools. Strategies to consider include:
- Direct transfer for rapid data migration with minimal changes.
- Cloud provider data transfer services.
- Data integrity and checks.
- Backup and restore.
- Data encryption, compression, and de-duplication.
When choosing a data security platform that supports cloud migration, consider whether it aligns with your organization’s technical needs and compliance policies. This instills confidence and assurance in the process, making it a cornerstone of a successful transition to the cloud.
Features to look for include:
- Governance and compliance. The platform should create strong governance and compliance cloud frameworks that maintain data security, mitigate risks, and adhere to relevant regulations.
- Testing. Functional, data migration, storage process, and resilience and scalability testing ensure a smooth migration process.
- Monitoring and optimization. Ensuring the GCP migration’s long-term safety and success requires constant performance, alerts, analytics, and security monitoring. Iterative assessment and improvement enhance performance and adapt to relevant changes.
GCP migration isn’t a one-size-fits-all process. It calls for a holistic strategy based on these and other best practices that help your organization unlock new avenues of growth and innovation.
