Spring is here! In my home, that means it’s time to clean house. With a house full of children – ages spanning from 3 to 17 – it’s essential we take inventory of everything we’ve collected over the years that no longer fits, is out of style, or is just plain broken so that we can return our living room to its intended use rather than the playground it’s become…even if only briefly.
Similar to spring providing us the opportunity to remove clutter from the home, migrating existing on-premises SharePoint deployments or legacy systems to Office 365 – SharePoint Online is a terrific time to take stock of the data you’ve accrued, understand the type of content that exists, and make decisions on what to do with it prior to actually performing the migration. With the emphasis never greater on IT modernization in the public sector space, the cloud is a tremendous opportunity to follow through on eGovernment and Gov 2.0 mandates.
So why hasn’t everyone jumped wholeheartedly into the cloud yet? Security remains a top concern. However, by analyzing and understanding the content before it is migrated, you can reduce the risk of access to sensitive content by tagging and classifying it appropriately as well as enjoy the added benefit of reducing the amount of content that would need to be migrated based on its content value.
As we’ve worked with public sector agencies contemplating moving some (or all) of their data to the cloud, we’ve worked with them to answer the following questions:
- What content is considered appropriate to move to the cloud?
- What should be kept on-premises due to regulatory requirements?
- What is our policy regarding sensitive information and where that content is stored?
- How do we monitor and enforce compliance of our sensitive information?
Ensuring compliance before you move to the cloud is vital for proper modernization of your IT environment. A good first step in this aim is to understand the type of content you have – only then can you begin making informed decisions on what to do with it and where it should go.
