As more organizations are choosing to deploy applications in the cloud, we're regularly finding IT groups that are wastefully trying to replicate their existing data center management and security approaches in the cloud. This often comes in the form of firewalls, load balancers, network proxies, access control, security appliances and services that are extended into the cloud with minimal rethinking. We've seen organizations build their own orchestration APIs in front of the cloud providers to constrain the services that can be utilized by teams. In most cases these layers serve only to cripple the capability, taking away most of the intended benefits of moving to the cloud. In this edition of the Radar, we've chosen to rehighlight cloud lift and shift as a technique to avoid. Organizations should instead look more deeply at the intent of their existing security and operational controls, and look for alternative controls that work in the cloud without creating unnecessary constraints. Many of those controls will already exist for mature cloud providers, and teams that adopt the cloud can use native APIs for self-serve provisioning and operations.

As cloud adoption grows we are unfortunately seeing a trend to treat the cloud as just another hosting provider. Cloud lift and shift is unfortunately being encouraged by large vendors re-branding existing hosting offerings as "cloud." Few of these offer any real flexibility or pay-as-you-use pricing. If you think you can move to the cloud without re-architecting, you are probably not doing it right.