Can you ever remain compliant if you don’t keep on top of your applications?
Businesses are embracing the cloud for its scalability, flexibility and productivity benefits, but the ever-more stringent regulatory landscape could be putting application migration projects on hold because of the non-compliance risks. With four-in-ten businesses not performing an annual risk assessment, it seems compliance has become overlooked, and a cause for concern, particularly in the face of growing cyber security threats.
And organisations could be exposing themselves to a lot of vulnerabilities, as on average in 2023, businesses are using 1,061 different applications – 133 apps more than a year ago. Keeping on top of security updates for all of them can be a monumental task. However, no matter how time-consuming or challenging the task for over-stretched IT teams, it should never be put on the backburner as eager hackers are always happy to wait for businesses to forget an update or lose application visibility when migrating before ‘doing some damage’. And when that happens, a hacked business might as well as recommend to its own customers that they switch to a competitor.
Too much at stake
With customer loyalty, revenue and reputation on the line, organisations need to feel the urgency to improve their application vulnerability management and adequately prepare them to migrate applications to cloud. With applications typically built to run on a particular operating system within a specific network infrastructure, migration to a new environment presents a number of security and compliance challenges. These challenges can easily multiply if organisations continue to consider applications as an afterthought – an approach that can lead to an overpriced migration and eye-watering fines from regulators.
Ensuring the right policies are in place is a critical starting point for compliance with regulations such as the GDPR and retaining ISO 27001 certification. The latter, although not legally required, is highly recommended to help protect against potential information security threats. In some instances, however, government and commercial enterprises specify in their contracts that their partner must uphold this certification as a proof they’ve implemented robust technical and organisational measures to protect data, including data accessed by third-party applications.
Aside from ISO 27001 and GDPR, which go arm in arm, the Cyber Essentials Plus certification is also often required from businesses to work with government bodies, and other organisations that handle sensitive data. In today’s competitive market that faces a growing number of cyber threats, it is an absolute minimum needed to demonstrate cybersecurity best practice to insurers, customers, investors and suppliers. Also is having the right controls to ensure all employees are complying with these policies to prevent any data leakage and associated consequences.
You can’t migrate what you can’t see
How can organisations evidence even the bare minimum without full application visibility though? Across many departments multiple versions of a single legacy application often sweep through the system, making them just so easy to miss. Even worse, if they’re managed outside of the jurisdiction of IT staff, as shadow IT is a wide open backdoor for opportunistic hackers. In addition, nearly-forgotten applications at the end-of-life or end-of-support stage will be more vulnerable to cyberattacks. If they’re older applications, they’re instantly more challenging to migrate to cloud as they tend to perform poorly in modern computing environments and can raise security alarm bells if they’re no longer being patched.
When cloud promises stronger security and better compliance than on-prem, an oversight in application management prior and during the migration will make that benefit hard to realise. Security and compliance are shared responsibilities between the cloud provider and the organisation, with the organisation needing to keep on top of security updates and patches for its applications to maximise the cloud security benefits. And for that, organisations need to change their approach to application management. Managed service providers can help businesses gain better application visibility, prevent compatibility issues, and ensure any outdated versions can be swiftly removed and safely retired as long as they know what they are looking for.
Managed services can drive compliant applications, with automated application packaging offering a great way to encourage efficiency and transformation. A chosen provider will perform compatibility testing before migration takes place, proactively update application portfolio, and support with in-depth data and performance analytics for more comprehensive compliance reporting. In a matter of a few hours, not months, saving time, money, and resources. More importantly, however, a specialist provider will thoroughly assess every application’s viability and priority for migration, so that businesses can start their cloud journey on a clean, more secure slate.
Future-proofing IT infrastructures
Application migration brings many benefits to organisations, one of which is the modernisation of IT architecture. It carries the advantages of greater efficiency, productivity, scalability, and agility that many businesses were missing out on when working purely on-prem. With the regulatory landscape becoming stricter across all industries, applications demand a more comprehensive level of attention. As a strategic business asset, they hold a key to compliance but only when updated regularly and managed appropriately.
