Cloud migrations force the opportunity to modernise security

The near universal strategy of migrating corporate applications to the cloud has left many companies in a hybrid middle state, in which they are working so hard to integrate cloud-based applications and services that they often end up with fragmented security architectures that are no longer able to protect them.

“There is a lot of demand to support and integrate Salesforce, SAP, Oracle ERP and all of those systems in the cloud,” noted Amit Saha, chief growth officer and co-founder of cloud identity security firm Saviynt.

“As well as the big trend around how we move all those workloads into the cloud, there is a big trend around how companies can ensure they are securing those from an end-to-end perspective.”

This transition state leaves companies exposed to the shortcomings of their legacy environments – with many existing security tools originally designed for on-premises deployment and management.

Such tools typically strain under the desire to integrate them across legacy and contemporary cloud-based systems – meaning, Saha said, that many companies who invested in security early are now finding that their technology “feels outdated…. There is a need to modernise all of that.”

Indeed, technology debt weighs heavily on companies of all sizes and industries – with many facing up to the need for an identity security overhaul at the same time as they are migrating substantial enterprise systems to the cloud, and implementing new cloud-based applications as well.

“Every five years, organisations have to go through massive efforts to upgrade those things,” said Saviynt senior vice president of strategy Henrique Texeira, who noted that such “costly” technology overhauls “take a lot of effort, a lot of time, and [create] distractions for organisations.”

By shifting the entire identity security to a cloud-based solution, he said, organisations can implement an overarching security framework that leverages the high availability, elasticity, and reliability of cloud environments.

“This is a big win,” he said, “because companies can subscribe to a cloud service and never have to worry about upgrades again.”