Why IAM Should Be a Foundation for Your AWS Migration

As cloud technologies and services become increasingly pervasive, accepted, and economically compelling, it’s no longer a matter of “if”, but when to migrate. However, an equally important question is how to migrate! And more and more, companies are moving some or all of their infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in order to realize lower capital costs and total cost of ownership, elastic scalability, and high availability at a global scale.

The Path to a Hybrid Infrastructure

Beyond simply moving to AWS, the goal of any well-thought-out cloud migration strategy is to prepare an organization for scalable, long-term growth, so that it can meet both the known and unknown future needs of the business. It is important that a migration plan fully considers which infrastructure types will be used and that the applications and services on those infrastructures properly integrate together.

Most organizations use a hybrid technology infrastructure, with a mix of SaaS technologies, such as Salesforce, Box, and Workday, and on-premises applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, SAP, and internally developed applications.

Migration will move many of those on-premises applications to AWS or other public cloud infrastructures, but some specialized applications may remain on premises.

Managing and Securing Access to Disparate Services

An architecturally diverse infrastructure may be the optimal choice for an organization looking to provide the best service to its customers, partners, and employees. However, managing and securing access to these disparate services can become very complex, impeding agility and growth. A failure to effectively address this complexity during migration planning can quickly lead to IT bottlenecks, productivity drains, or worse, severe lapses in security and data privacy.

Using an identity and access management (IAM) solution as a foundation for your AWS migration strategy can reduce this complexity, smooth out the overall process, and help ensure a successful transition to the cloud. With a robust IAM solution, an IT organization can simply and effectively provision and manage the complete identity lifecycle of all users within an organization’s systems—wherever they reside.

This enablement makes IAM a key part of your corporate infrastructure, connecting all users to all applications and services. Additionally, deploying IAM on Amazon Web Services realizes many of the same economic and technical benefits of the cloud. Together, modern IAM and AWS deployment create an ideal foundation for migrating the rest of your corporate infrastructure to the cloud.

Making IAM a Focal Point of Your Migration Strategy

IAM is a foundational component of your cross infrastructure architecture, and therefore, it is crucial to make it a focal point in the initial part of your migration strategy.