Cloud Migration Security Guide: Risks & Checklist
· via Spacelift
Why this matters now: Migrations create a window where data lives in two places, identities double, and temporary access hardens into permanent access. The guide builds on the observation that most cloud security failures trace back to human error and misconfiguration, and a migration is the moment both peak. The environment keeps changing after cutover, so the guide treats security as continuous work. It is the security companion to the planning work in moving from on-prem to AWS.
Three takeaways:
- The guide maps the risks to each migration phase and ends in a runnable checklist. Before the move: incomplete asset inventories and compliance gaps. During: data exposure in transit, credential sprawl and misconfiguration. After: drift and decaying baselines. A single flat risk list hides which of these apply to you this week.
- Know who owns what during the move. The shared responsibility boundary shifts with each service type, managed offerings hand more of it to the provider, and mid-migration your data, identities and configurations sit on both sides of it at once. Enable logging for every cloud service from day one; retrofitting it later rarely happens.
- Expire migration access by design. Grant scoped, time-bound credentials for migration tasks and revoke them when the task ends. Use private transfer paths like VPN or Direct Connect for the data move, deploy the new estate through IaC with policy scanning, and re-verify encryption, logging and identity once workloads land. The guide also splits credentials across humans, machines and agents, a distinction that matters more now that agents run parts of the pipeline.
What I’d add today: Security primitives will be even more important now with the powerful AI models being able to perform cyber attacks at scale. Focus on the basics and make sure you have a robust security baseline.
Who should read it: teams planning a lift to the cloud, and security folks handed a migration halfway through. If the destination spans more than one provider, the multi-cloud security problems start before the migration ends, so read them together.