With today’s treacherous threat landscape, security is a top concern for every company. No matter what size a business is or what industry it belongs to, hackers can find enough value in its corporate and customer data to want to steal it. Cybercriminals can use the applications your company develops to capture and compromise data if you don’t make security part of the DevOps process.

According to the 2021 State of the Cloud Report, the pandemic has accelerated the already healthy rate of cloud adoption, with 29% of companies using cloud more than they had planned to previously. The report found that 31% of companies are investing more than $12 million in the public cloud per year.

When companies think about monitoring their infrastructures, the need to prevent cyberattacks often comes to mind because of recent acts of cyberterrorism. 

Over the last decade, the cloud has gained popularity and acceptance, evolving from an emerging technology that inspired concerns about lack of security, to almost every company’s go-to solution. Now, it’s common for organizations to take a cloud-first approach to technology.

But is the cloud really right for everyone?

Researchers at McKinsey & Company reported that the pandemic has spurred digital transformation for businesses, speeding up the adoption of digital operations by 3 to 4 years. Customers and employees rely on digital processes to access products and services and conduct business during the shutdown, prompting companies to adapt or risk losing a competitive edge.

The cloud is only as good as its supporting network. Data needs to be transmitted from endpoints where it is generated to the cloud and to and from cloud environments and on-premises resources. In particular, hybrid cloud and multicloud environments benefit from a fast, responsive, and reliable network that connects different cloud instances.  

The way companies use cloud has been evolving. Organizations are turning to new types of cloud services and branching out into hybrid cloud and multicloud environments. This transformation in the way the cloud is being leveraged puts greater demands on the supporting network infrastructure. 

Cloud has become so popular that the market is almost saturated. The 2019 State of the Cloud Report discovered that 94% of the companies surveyed use cloud and 84% of them have adopted a multi-cloud strategy that uses two or more clouds managed by multiple vendors.

These days, the question is not whether to adopt the cloud but what type of cloud to adopt. An overwhelming majority of companies use some type of cloud, and many have taken a cloud-first approach to their overall technology strategy. Gartner predicted that organizations that don’t use a cloud-first strategy will lose out to their competitors.

When it comes to a company's infrastructure, the word "migration" can strike fear and dread in the hearts of many CIOs and IT Directors. Why? Cost. Cost is the number one issue and time is a close second. The day to day workload is impacted by a migration and people are a costly internal resource. These are hurdles the CIO must take into account when looking at a migration. Aside from cost and time, CIOs need to ensure that the data is moved without running into a ton of problems along the way. But there are some measures that can be taken to mitigate these issues and make the migration a smooth one.