Y O U D E S E R V E T H E B E S T S E C U R I T Y

WHAT’S BLOCKING YOUR SECURE CLOUD MIGRATION?

AND BEST PRACTICES FOR MITIGATION

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Contents Introduction 3

Challenge 1: People Hurdles 4 Lack of Team Knowledge 4 Lack of Team Availability and Internal Conflicts 4

Challenge 2: Process Hurdles 6 Pace of Change 6 Competing Strategies 7

Challenge 3: Technology Hurdles 8 Multiple Point Solutions 8 Security Misconceptions 8 Legacy Applications 9

Best Practices to Overcome Cloud Migration Security Hurdles 10 Migrating Securely to the Cloud 10 Unifying Your Threat Prevention 10 Pursuing Operational Efficiency and Consistency 11 Adopting a Consolidated Platform 11 Automating Security 12 Reducing Siloed Responsibilities 12

Customer Use Case: Gaining Cloud-Level Visibility 13 Securing Cloud, DevOps, and Confidence 14

Enable Industry-Leading Cloud Security with CloudGuard 14

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Introduction

Growing companies are embracing the scalability, expected cost-savings, and

competitive edge achieved through migrating workloads to the cloud. However,

as they embark on this transformative journey, they often encounter security and

operational challenges spanning the people, processes, and technologies at their

organization.

This white paper delves into the security challenges organizations face during the

cloud migration phase and securing their cloud deployment and ongoing cloud

activities after migration. Practical solutions for the hurdles are provided in the

second section of the white paper.

We interviewed Check Point’s cloud security experts and customers from the

Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific, gathering their first-hand accounts and insights

on what their customers and prospects report as migration obstacles.

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Challenge 1: People Hurdles Deploying advanced solutions is essential for both secure cloud migration and post-migration cloud security. However, while these tools are vital, they are only as effective as the teams that deploy and subsequently manage them.

The human element, sometimes overlooked in the excitement of technology, is critical in the initial deployment and ongoing risk management phases. Without skilled oversight, even the most advanced systems can become liabilities. The global shortage of qualified cloud security engineers intensifies the challenge for organizations.

Lack of Team Knowledge Organizations often overestimate their team’s cloud skills, leading to a gap between expectations and reality, especially in cloud security knowledge. Introducing new cloud solutions requires skilled engineers or training engineers for new cloud skills.

However, the growing number of these solutions and the pace of change of new technology means there is a constant race for upskilling and self-learning. Add the pressure of speedy implementations with poor coordination and this results in overwhelmed engineers and a disorganized, less secure cloud migration process.

Even with a dedicated cloud security team, unclear roles and responsibilities can also add to confusion and inefficiency.

For example: A financial services provider decided to migrate to the cloud and assumed that operating and securing it would be similar enough to what they already do on-premises and did not train or hire skilled cloud engineers. They did not take into account their additional risk as a result of moving to the cloud, nor how different cloud actually is, for example, using cloud Marketplaces, deployment templates, patching, troubleshooting, and other new processes with which they were not familiar. These new skills are not always complex, but they took time to learn and slowed down the customer’s secure migration.

Lack of Team Availability and Internal Conflicts We’ve bundled these together as even in organizations that have employees with the requisite skills for a secure cloud transition, the availability of such resources is not guaranteed.

Cloud and security proficient IT teams often balance multiple pressing responsibilities vying for their time and attention. Skilled team members are often pulled in multiple directions and tasked with many responsibilities, diluting their focus on secure cloud migration.

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This causes delays and inconsistencies in the migration process, as the dedicated effort required for a seamless and secure transition is only intermittently available.

For example: Another large university we spoke with has skilled security engineers, but realized after-the-fact that those engineers did not always have the time needed to adequately plan and execute their move to the cloud - because they were still responsible for day-to-day on-premises security operations. They also told us that in their early cloud migration planning sessions, not all stakeholders were invited and after the meetings started, they realized that key people were missing (in one case, the person with access rights to deploy solutions from the cloud Marketplace), which also caused delays.

Organizations’ internal conflicts can complicate the cloud transition journey further. Decisions on cloud security tools and processes are often swayed by politics instead of objective organizational needs. Disputes between on-prem engineers and cloud security teams regarding how best to migrate from on-premises to the cloud are a sensitive obstacle to overcome. This is due to the fact that there is no one “correct” solution or process.

Such internal conflicts can hinder secure and efficient cloud adoption, emphasizing the need for a collaborative platform to align teams and facilitate a smooth transition.

For example: A pharmaceutical company we spoke with did not have a defined process for evaluating what could or should be moved to the cloud - this caused conflicts and hindered progress in moving workloads to the cloud that would benefit from this move. Additionally, their secure migration was often complicated by processes and services that they were not allowed to implement. In one case their management did not approve registering to a new cloud service because of a new service limit; in another case the company’s auditor insisted on changes to the traffic flow which did not match their previous architectural design.

In another example, a Check Point cloud security architect explained how a customer’s new cloud security team did not consult with the experienced on-prem security team. The on-prem team had deployed new data centers in the past and amassed relevant expertise but were not involved even though many of the basic security concepts were similar.

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Challenge 2: Process Hurdles Effective processes play a vital role in successful cloud migration, offering a structured framework for transitioning data and applications. They ensure efficient and secure coordination of migration components. However, many organizations face challenges with outdated or ineffective security processes, which can hinder their cloud migration efforts, even with skilled teams and advanced technology at their disposal.

Without strong processes, collaboration between people and technology breaks down, resulting in an ineffective attempt to secure the infrastructure, leaving critical resources exposed.

Pace of Change Some organizations move quickly to the cloud, and some move more cautiously. Both approaches can impact your secure cloud migration.

Poor planning leads many organizations to approach a cloud transition with hesitation, resulting in a slow and disjointed process. Instead of reaping the benefits of an efficient and well-planned migration, these organizations face delays in establishing a coherent architecture and security posture due to their hesitant approach.

The slow pace of transition often leads to a patchwork of security solutions adopted to address emerging needs without a comprehensive strategy.

A lack of significant progress then makes it challenging for the organization to justify further investment in cloud initiatives. It thus hinders the potential growth and advantages a well-executed and secure cloud migration could offer an organization.

Alternatively, many organizations hear the value of a cloud transition and dive in. In their haste to adopt cloud technologies, they integrate on-premises solutions into the cloud where they cannot perform effectively.

Similarly, companies trying to migrate as fast as possible often use a third-party vendor who is outcome-driven but not process-driven. In this case, the third-party vendor completes the migration, but the organization does not land up with a complete flow that is aligned with their software development life cycle.

For example: Check Point cloud security experts point out that poor planning (not only in cloud) consistently causes disruption and risk – both from an operational perspective as well as from a security perspective. They often see customers not performing sufficient risk management, like

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allocating a time buffer for things that could go wrong. A large healthcare provider planned an architecture only to rip it out and redeploy it differently, because they were moving too fast, after they realized that a particular requirement will not work with their chosen architecture.

Competing Strategies During cloud migration, organizations face many competing strategies and must consider trade-offs. For example, developers prioritize speed, while security teams emphasize safety, causing tension.

Another example is around migration strategies. The faster “lift-and-shift” method is less disruptive to services but might not implement security accurately for the cloud, while the thorough refactoring approach takes more time but is often more comprehensive, allowing security controls to be tailored for the new environment.

For example: A city municipality divided all applications into two buckets: all existing on-premises applications will migrate using “lift-and-shift”, and all new applications will be refactored. The security teams have responsibility for the “lift-and-shift”, while the developers are responsible for the refactoring and push forward, often in an unsecure manner. Thus, the two strategies never converge, even though they are not competing.

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Challenge 3: Technology Hurdles Technological challenges can impede secure cloud migration. Companies face obstacles such as compatibility issues and selecting the right security measures, which slow the migration process and create potential security risks. This is further complicated by the challenges related to integrating new technologies without disrupting current operations.

Additionally, the market is flooded with vendors, each claiming to have the best solution, often leading to decision paralysis.

Multiple Point Solutions Relying on multiple point solutions during and after cloud migration presents significant challenges, creating a complex organizational environment. Implementing and managing disparate solutions requires a steep learning curve and multiple careful integrations. This increases the managerial work and complexity, which, in turn, leads to potential inefficiencies and additional security risks.

Multiple point solutions can also cause alert fatigue from numerous disparate notifications, further complicating management and reducing the efficiency of the security team.

These disconnected solutions cannot seamlessly share insights across security layers and capabilities as integrated platforms do, causing organizations to miss out on the intuitive “1+1=3” synergy. This renders these solutions difficult and often counterproductive.

For example: A hospitality company started off their cloud journey in AWS and chose to only implement AWS security solutions. After acquiring another company that was using Azure, the security team realized it would be impossible to integrate their existing solutions with the acquired organization’s Azure security, because of the complexity and added risk due to inconsistencies between the security controls.

Security Misconceptions A common misconception is that all cloud security solutions offer similar levels of protection. This is not the case: tools can vary greatly in effectiveness and functionality.

Cloud vendor firewalls provide fundamental protection as noted by Gartner, but are considered as entry level “niche players”, and they fall short compared to advanced solutions. Superior cybersecurity vendor products offer enhanced threat intelligence, seamless integration, and robust defense against sophisticated attacks, all of which are essential in today’s complex security environment.

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Organizations failing to discern product differences and not choosing advanced solutions will be at a disadvantage.

For example: Check Point experts caution that “check the box” security may be adequate on paper but disastrous in practice. Many times, those solutions are just good enough to pass an audit but are unable to perform against advanced threats which puts organizations at great risk. Similarly, to the previous example, choosing a solution specific to each cloud environment adds operational overhead and even more risk.

Legacy Applications Despite the growing pressure to migrate everything to the cloud, the presence of legacy technology significantly complicates this process, introducing additional security risks.

Many organizations are often reluctant to move their legacy applications to the cloud due to inherent vulnerabilities in their design, as these older applications are typically harder to secure, patch, or update. Even though legacy teams are knowledgeable, they're often sidelined in discussions about new technology adoption.

Organizations must have a clear and compelling reason for migration, such as enhanced security, cost reductions, increased reliability, or improved manageability. Without a clear goal, migrating legacy apps adds complexity without delivering the anticipated benefits.

For example: A large insurance company moved a legacy application to the cloud, but the load balancers in the cloud unexpectedly interfered with the application’s fail-over processes. This is an example of an organization not understanding the limits of an application until it needs to function in the new cloud environment. Often the cloud service functionality is set by the cloud provider and cannot be changed to suit the organization’s need. The Check Point cloud security architect called this “the law of unexpected consequences” when moving legacy applications to the cloud.

Often, a “lift-and-shift” application that breaks in the cloud is a sign that some fundamental assumption is incorrect. This requires planning for a thorough fix. However, an application that works in the cloud may hide internal flaws that result in unexpectedly high monthly bills, which may go unnoticed for months or longer.

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Best Practices to Overcome Cloud Migration Security Hurdles Navigating the path to a secure migration can indeed seem daunting. However, by harnessing best practices, each challenge can be effectively addressed and overcome.

This necessitates a blend of both technical adjustments and pivotal operational changes, and organizations must be committed to making informed decisions and implementing structured planning rather than an informal approach.

Migrating Securely to the Cloud Despite beliefs that cloud migrations are complex, organizations can ensure secure transitions by starting with a resilient foundation. Integral to this foundation are the 3Cs of best security:

By anchoring their approach in these principles, organizations can significantly bolster their security posture, ensuring a confident and efficient migration process.

Unifying Your Threat Prevention To tackle cloud migration challenges, companies must recognize the need for advanced threat prevention and a multi-layered security approach across on-premises and diverse cloud environments. A unified threat prevention strategy and tech stack solution is the answer, transcending mere focus on isolated security aspects, offering consistent security for all assets and workloads across multiple distributed environments.

Such a comprehensive approach helps organizations transition from legacy applications and embrace cutting-edge technology solutions that provide stronger and more modern security capabilities across the cloud environment. Even for organizations that adopted the cloud in bursts, with quick and erratic growth, defenses remain consistent, adaptive, and resilient across their hybrid infrastructure.

Comprehensive, emphasizing a broad protection strategy

Consolidated, endorsing a unified security platform

Collaborative, championing cooperation among teams and tools for proactive threat prevention and threat management

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Customer example: Emaar is a multinational real estate development company based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and combines on-premises data centers with assets and workloads across Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and VMware NSX-T private cloud.

Pursuing Operational Efficiency and Consistency Operational consistency is about clear management direction. Organizations must define a clear path, set growth priorities, and establish concrete timelines and ownership roles. This decisive strategy helps place cloud migration as a priority, diminishing potential confusion and ensuring a collaborative environment where all teams are aligned in their objectives and methods, resolving internal conflicts that may otherwise arise about ownership.

Consistent tools across domains, from on-premises to public and private clouds, streamline the cloud migration process. It also helps organizations bridge the knowledge gap as new and existing employees face a reduced learning scope, facilitating a more fluid migration journey and reducing the risk caused by lack of consistency.

Customer example: Clarks was founded by two brothers in 1825, invented the world's first foot- shaped shoe and has sold over forty-six million pairs worldwide. Using CloudGuard Network Security as well as Check Point’s Quantum on-premises security gateways, Clarks gained consistent security protection, policy enforcement, and full visibility between the premises and cloud networks.

Adopting a Consolidated Platform A consolidated platform holds advantages over fragmented point solutions. A unified approach enhances security, sidestepping the vulnerabilities of multiple disjointed solutions, especially those stemming from relying on less mature cloud-vendor-provided solutions.

With a single interface, unified reporting, and comprehensive visibility across different cloud providers, organizations can navigate their security landscape and improve their cloud security posture with greater ease and confidence. This approach simplifies the management process, especially for those operating across multiple domains, from on-prem to various public and private cloud environments. For new hires, this also accelerates onboarding and promotes quicker talent integration. Experienced engineers can seamlessly extend security into new cloud deployments.

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Customer example: The Denver Broncos are a professional American football franchise based in Denver, Colorado. Their IT team leverages Check Point on-premises network security, endpoint security and CloudGuard Network Security to prevent threats across the organization’s entire attack surface. Russ Trainor, Senior Vice President of Information Technology, said: “Check Point gives us a great way to consolidate that viewpoint, so we’re not jumping between different systems if an alert comes up.”.

Automating Security As developers roll out new features at an accelerated pace as organizations migrate to the cloud and embrace its long-term benefits, manual security processes and tasks have become impractical and increase business risk. Security automation addresses this by ensuring consistent enforcement of protocols, security best practices, and regulations. Automated tools uniformly apply security policies across all systems, eliminating potential oversights by leveraging automated governance systems that identify, prevent, and rectify misconfigurations. This lets organizations scale security with operations and compensates for limited team availability by automating tedious processes.

Customer example: Inventec, based in Taiwan, manufactures a diverse range of electronics products and offers contract manufacturing services for global electronics companies. Unified Security Management is saving time and resources for Inventec's security team. Security gateways are automatically updated with the latest protections and Unified Security Management dynamically updates policies, mapping user and cloud assets as they change.

Reducing Siloed Responsibilities Operational consistency also requires discovering and resolving areas of conflict. For example, where development teams perceive that security teams are slowing their agility, and security teams perceive development teams to work irresponsibly and without responsible processes.

Effective and consolidated cloud security solutions encourage improved communication between these teams, balancing these conflicting priorities to enable a secure, smooth, and effective cloud migration.

Customer example: Xero provides a global online platform for small businesses and their advisors from its headquarters in Wellington, New Zealand. Xero’s Head of Security Engineering and Architecture said “Instead of putting up security 'gates' that require developers to stop and seek security assistance or input, we can deploy 'guardrails' that help developers stay on the road without impeding their progress. We now have the freedom to accelerate development and grow without limits, while still protecting our brand."

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Customer Use Case: Gaining Cloud-Level Visibility Eagers Automotive began its journey to the cloud by migrating its on-premises Microsoft Exchange environment to Office 365. Soon afterwards, the IT team began migrating servers to AWS, and more recently, Azure. The cloud gives Eagers Automotive greater agility and makes it much easier to keep systems updated with the latest capabilities. Primary infrastructure has typically been implemented in AWS, but in the past year, Eagers Automotive has begun deploying both infrastructure and development capabilities in the Azure cloud.

"We initially relied on native AWS or Azure cloud security tools," said Mark Nix, National Information Security, Risk & Governance Manager for Eagers Automotive. "We could scan for vulnerabilities in each cloud environment, but the native tools didn't really cover all of the functions we needed."

In addition to increasing security controls for their cloud-based assets, the team needed better visibility into each environment. Going forward, more applications and in-house development will be moved into the cloud, and the security team needed an easier way to see—and secure—everything.

"We needed a better solution for gaining visibility and ensuring compliance across both AWS and Azure environments," said Nix. "We also wanted shift-left capabilities, so that we can implement security into new development at the code level. We began looking for a new cloud security vendor."

In addition to achieving better visibility and support for secure development, Eagers Automotive wanted a proven vendor with a strong reputation. Management simplicity was also important. With a rapidly growing estate to secure, automation and unified management were essential. After considering several vendors for cloud security and other, separate vendors for DevOps security solutions, Eagers Automotive chose Check Point CloudGuard Network Security and CloudGuard Posture Management.

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Securing Cloud, DevOps, and Confidence CloudGuard provides unified, cloud-native security across applications, workloads, and cloud networks. CloudGuard Network Security's advanced threat prevention protects cloud assets and workloads from the most sophisticated threats across both AWS and Azure environments. The team gained visualization for all cloud traffic, security alerts, assets and auto-remediation from a single platform. Enriched contextual information from multiple log sources delivers fast, clear understanding of events that occur in either cloud environment.

CloudGuard Posture Management automates governance across multi- cloud assets and services. Now the team can visualize and assess security posture, detect misconfigurations, model and actively enforce gold-standard policies. Complying with best practices is easy with the ability to modify and automate processes.

With CloudGuard, Eagers Automotive can shift left—bringing CloudGuard security capabilities into the CI/CD pipeline to detect and prevent risk in cloud deployments. DevOps teams can scan Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates for risk, check software for known vulnerabilities, and scan buckets and containers for security issues.

Enable Industry-Leading Cloud Security with CloudGuard CloudGuard enables organizations to achieve a secure, hassle-free cloud migration, built on a foundation of the 3Cs: comprehensive, consolidated, and collaborative.

CloudGuard offers a comprehensive suite of advanced threat prevention and security solutions, effectively safeguarding your assets and workloads across diverse cloud environments.

Experience a consolidated platform that streamlines your security processes, providing a unified interface, clear reporting, and consistent visibility across all popular cloud providers. CloudGuard simplifies management and enhances security.

Furthermore, CloudGuard fosters a collaborative security approach that seamlessly integrates with your operational changes, ensuring uniform policy enforcement and scalable protection that grows with your organization.

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Promote Innovation. Protect Your Enterprise. Ignite Business Success.

With CloudGuard, organizations can navigate the complex cloud security landscape confidently and efficiently, knowing they have a robust ally in safeguarding their digital assets. CloudGuard covers cloud security use cases comprehensively, to protect you from code to cloud, over all clouds, whatever your level of cloud experience, wherever you are in your cloud migration journey and for every cloud migration strategy.

A key foundational layer of all cloud migrations is cloud network security, where organizations deploy virtual security gateways to provide advanced threat prevention, traffic inspection, and micro- segmentation. According to GigaOm Radar for Cloud Network Security, “The network is the point of entry of any attacker, which means it also needs to be the first line of defense.”

Schedule a free demo of CloudGuard Network Security today to learn best practices to secure your cloud migration using the 3Cs.

Many thanks to Jeff Engel, Gustavo Coronel and Christian Castillo for their contributions to this white paper. Thanks also to Lee Psinakis, Aaron Brongersma, Rolando Panez, Ron Carney, Nigel Spence, Bisham Kishnani, Michael Stichel and Stefan Pompe.