What is cloud transformation?
Cloud transformation is the strategic evolution of an organization’s infrastructure, applications, and processes to fully leverage cloud-native capabilities. It goes beyond simply migrating workloads—cloud transformation reshapes how your business builds, secures, and delivers technology.
Cloud transformation is like moving your business from a single, crowded office building to a flexible suite of offices in a modern business park. In both cases, you get more space, better tools, and the ability to easily adapt to your changing needs.
Here are a few situations that might trigger cloud transformation in your organization:
Migrating from on-premises infrastructure to public cloud
Refactoring applications into modern architectures like containers or serverless
Adopting multi-cloud or hybrid cloud models
Modernizing data management and storage with cloud-based data solutions
Embracing more up-to-date development practices like IaC, CI/CD, and DevOps practices
Cloud transformation is easily confused with cloud migration. But in fact, cloud migration is usually a one-time process of transitioning services or applications to the cloud, usually with minimal change or disruption. You may have heard this referred to as “lift and shift,” meaning you’re taking your non–cloud based resources and simply relocating them to the cloud.
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Cloud transformation, on the other hand, involves choosing paradigms and strategies specifically suited to the cloud. For example, you might be shifting to a microservices architecture so your app can take advantage of the strengths of the cloud like scalability and resilience. And remember: in the cloud, security is a shared responsibility. Cloud providers secure the infrastructure, but organizations must secure their configurations, identities, and data.
Cloud transformation isn’t a one-time project: Because it’s about changing paradigms across your organization, it’s more of an ongoing, evolutionary process. In this blog post, we’ll explore the benefits and main phases of cloud transformation along with the security hazards and pitfalls associated with the process.
Is cloud transformation worth it?
Yes—but only when it aligns with your business goals.
As with any strategic transformation, you’ll need to weigh the effort and investment along with the potential ROI.
Cloud transformation can enable faster innovation, scalability, and competitive advantage. Potential benefits include:
Faster time to market, thanks to readily available cloud services and infrastructure
On-demand scalability and performance, so you consume only the resources you need
Improved developer velocity and collaboration enabled by integrated cloud-based tools
Operational efficiency through the automation of routine tasks and infrastructure management
Improved security posture through automation, continuous monitoring, and cloud-native visibility—especially when identity, workload, and data risks are correlated in context.
The key to realizing the full potential of your cloud transformation is to approach it strategically, not just as a tech migration but as a shift in how your business operates.
Choosing a cloud transformation path: migration vs. modernization
Cloud transformation isn't a one-size-fits-all process; there are several different paths. Each of these paths involves trade-offs between speed, cost, and how much change you’re willing and able to make to your existing systems.
The strategy you choose will have an impact on how quickly you see benefits and the level of long-term optimization you can achieve. Understanding these trade-offs will help you pick the best strategy for your organization's needs and goals.
Lift and shift
Migrating applications to the cloud with minimal alterations is often the fastest way to get up and running in the cloud. But this approach may lead to inefficiencies in the long run. You might have higher cloud expenses down the line with this approach.
Re-platforming
You may be able to save money and simplify cloud transformation by making some modifications to your applications to leverage cloud services. For example, you might choose a cloud data solution or shift from Windows to a Linux-based virtual machine to save on licensing costs.
Refactoring
This approach is the most time-consuming and the one with the greatest up-front investment. It involves redesigning and rewriting applications to be cloud-native, leveraging cloud capabilities so you get better scalability and efficiency. This could help deliver long-term cost savings and give you increased business agility.
What are the main phases of cloud transformation?
Now let’s take a look at the main stages of the cloud transformation process, including some of the main pitfalls of each phase.
| Phase | Description | Pitfalls to watch for… |
|---|---|---|
| Assessment & planning | Inventory assets, define scope, and identify dependencies. | Don’t underestimate the complexity and interdependencies of your IT environment. (Doing so could lead to flawed strategies and unexpected costs.) |
| Migration strategy | Choose the most appropriate migration strategy for your organization. | Choose the best strategy for your long-term goals and desired outcomes, not just your immediate technical needs. |
| Modernization | Identify useful cloud-native services and architectures. | Leveraging a cloud provider's full ecosystem can unlock powerful efficiencies, but avoid lock-in where it counts to ensure future flexibility. |
| Optimization | Fine-tune for cost, performance, and operations. | Immediate cost cutting may limit future growth and agility; also consider long-term performance, scalability, and operational impact. |
| Security hardening | Implement security controls post-migration. | Be aware of the shared responsibility model; mistaken assumptions about who’s handling security can lead to critical misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. |
What are some security risks during cloud transformation and beyond?
As with any period of transition, cloud transformation requires proactive security to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. What are some of the biggest risks to look out for?
Lack of visibility into new cloud infrastructure
(Find out how one consumer goods manufacturer maintained visibility while keeping control over security as their cloud usage expanded rapidly.)
Misconfigurations due to rapid provisioning
Identity sprawl and excessive permissions
Inconsistent controls across hybrid environments
Finally, while IaC templates offer a high degree of control over server configuration in theory, in practice IaC drift is another risk that can cause problems.
Drift can result from manual updates, third-party tools modifying resources outside of pipelines, or inconsistencies between dev/staging/prod. This introduces hard-to-spot blind spots that often evade change management workflows.
How can you secure your cloud transformation?
Let’s look at some important strategic principles to keep in mind during cloud transformation along with some cloud security best practices.
Establish cloud visibility early
Make sure you have a comprehensive understanding of all your cloud resources, and put controls in place to manage them effectively from the initial stages of your cloud transformation.
Best practice
Tools that automate the tracking and monitoring of cloud resources, like an agentless cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP), will help you understand what’s running and where.
Adopt identity-first security
Prioritize securing the identities of users and services—including non-human identities (NHIs)—as the core way to control access within your cloud environment.
Best practice
Implement least privilege, granting only necessary access; choose tools that let you easily monitor effective permissions and flag issues like overpermissioning and unused accounts.
Automate policy enforcement
Ensure consistent security and compliance across your cloud environment at scale by automating the application of your security policies.
Best practice
Take advantage of the wide range of automated scanning tools available to you like IaC scanning, shift-left tooling, and policy as code (PaC) to take the burden off your teams’ shoulders.
Continuously monitor for misconfigurations and drift
Your cloud environment can quickly get out of hand. Keep it secure and compliant over time by continuously tracking and addressing any misconfigurations or deviations from your intended setup.
Best practice
Tools like cloud security posture management (CSPM) and cloud identity and entitlement management (CIEM) can help take care of ongoing checks and perform automated fixes across accounts and regions.
Secure your CI/CD pipeline
Security should never be an afterthought. Identify and resolve security problems early in the software development process by implementing security measures throughout your automated build, test, and deployment stages.
Best practice
Add security scans and tests to harden your build process and monitor changes.
Prioritize posture over alerts
Putting out fires isn’t enough. For a higher level of security maturity for your organization, focus on proactively preventing security issues, rather than solely relying on responding to alerts once they occur.
Best practice
Set and maintain strong security standards for all resources, focusing on context-driven risk insights, not noise (like multiple alerts for the same issue, even though that issue is less critical to your business).
Secure cloud transformation starts with Wiz
As a CNAPP, Wiz helps you achieve secure cloud transformation without the complexity.
When you’re moving and refactoring your current applications for the cloud, it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks. Wiz ensures that that won’t happen by giving you a clear picture of what's happening in your cloud.
At the core of Wiz is the Security Graph—our contextual analysis engine that correlates identity, data, workload, and network risk across every phase of your transformation.
And with its code-to-cloud focus, Wiz also brings your security and development teams together so they’re on the same page.
Wiz gives your teams the right information at the right time, enriched with the context they need so they can fix problems without slowing things down. The result? They can do their work more easily, keeping your cloud secure and compliant as you're making changes.
With Wiz, you get…
Full-stack visibility from day one
Identity, data, workload, and config risk correlated in one graph
Agentless deployment that supports fast-moving teams
Coverage across cloud, containers, CI/CD, and IaC
Unlike some security solutions, which flood security teams with a torrent of alerts based on standalone vulnerabilities or misconfigurations, Wiz gives you the bigger picture.
When a potential incident is detected, Wiz triggers meaningful alerts enriched with data about actual risk factors like network exposure, unprotected data, and excessive permissions. By assessing these toxic combinations across multiple layers, Wiz helps your teams quickly pinpoint the real risks that threaten your business, cutting the blast radius and minimizing the impact of any security incident.
Plus, with built-in compliance automation against 100+ industry standards, Wiz truly has your back.
See how Wiz can help your team plan, execute, and secure every step of your cloud transformation—without slowing innovation. Request a personalized demo today.
