Lifting and shifting apps to the cloud: a source of risk creep?

Public cloud infrastructures have come a long way over the past 16 years to slowly earn the trust of enterprises in running their most important applications and storing sensitive data. In the Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2022, more than a third of enterprises that operate their own IT infrastructure said they also placed some of their mission-critical workloads in a public cloud.

This gradual change in enterprises’ posture, however, can only be partially attributed to improved or more visible cloud resiliency. An equal, or arguably even bigger, component in this shift in attitude is enterprises’ willingness to make compromises when using the cloud, which includes sometimes accepting less resilient cloud data center facilities. However, a more glaring downgrade lies in the loss of the ability to configure IT hardware specifically for sensitive business applications.