Businesses in the UK planning to migrate from local storage or the current cloud storage environment to another cloud must take all the essential steps to lower security risks in data migration.
Enterprises, MSPs, and SMBs need to work with the migration vendor to ensure all the data and information-related processes comply with the EU GDPR, UK GDPR, and the UK Data Protection Act.
Some of these data migration security best practices can help UK-based businesses of all sizes and industries ensure optimum safety throughout the migration project.
Table of Contents
1. Choosing an On-prem Migration Environment
Companies with highly sensitive data, such as government organisations, healthcare providers, educational institutions, and banks, must ensure uncompromised security during the data transfer process.
One of the best ways for these types of organisations to lower security risks in data migration is to perform the entire migration in an on-prem environment.
For example, when migrating Google Drive to OneDrive, these types of organisations can perform the migration entirely in a local environment. With this approach, the data transfer takes place locally and is not exposed to external shared networks.
2. Hosting the Migration Environment Within the UK
As part of following data migration security best practices, businesses in the UK must ensure that the migration service provider they partner with hosts the migration environment within the UK to comply with the GDPR rules.
For example, UK businesses planning to migrate from Dropbox to OneDrive must ensure data residency by having the migration environment staged in UK servers.
UK businesses partnering with international data migration service providers, such as CloudFuze, need to ensure that the entire operations are carried out within the UK.
3. Amending T&CS to Comply With the UK Data Protection Act
Businesses in the UK partnering with a data migration vendor outside of the UK or EU region must amend the migration terms and conditions to make them meet their requirements while adhering to the UK Data Protection Act.
For example, UK and EU businesses planning to migrate Box to SharePoint must understand how Box data is accessed and ensure that the API is the touchpoint. Also, it is crucial to review all the information security policies of the migration service provider and make changes to any if required during the onboarding process.
4. Ensuring Record-keeping of Processing Activities – Article 30 GDPR
Businesses of all sizes in the UK must ensure that the migration service provider creates and maintains a detailed record of all the processing activities to adhere to Article 30 of the GDPR. The record-keeping also helps streamline the legal processes, which, in turn, shortens the time it takes to execute the migration project.
