You think you have thought of everything and are ready to go. You’ve spent time planning how you will move to the public cloud, you’ve dreamt of how you will use all that money you saved and just maybe thought about how much more free time you will have when you don’t have to jump through hoops to get anything done.

It’s probable that you have been reassured by the wealth of information at the Microsoft Trust Centre or Amazon Cloud Security Site, of just how secure and safe their public cloud offerings have become, and in many respects they have addressed many clients concerns. For the most part the design, resilience and scale of the platform far exceeds the budgets of any client.

Many assume that moving to Azure or AWS takes care of everything, however, some responsibilities will still be yours or you may be taking them back if you had a managed outsourcer agreement in place.  For example, the server patching and configuration.

There are some great automation and management solutions designed to help you manage cloud infrastructure. Offerings such as Microsoft Operation Management Suite that provides visibility and control across public clouds and hybrid environments. Infrastructure and application automation tools such as Chef, Puppet and Ansible, which can help you achieve speed, scale and consistency by automating configuration and systems management – I could go on!

Moving to the public cloud does not in itself remove the need for enterprise class Firewalls.  It’s just as critical as before, but you will need to explore and familiarise yourself with newer virtual appliances that are best suited for the public cloud environment.

Your choice will come down to ease of management, ease of deployment and cost. It is possible that you have not had to manage these devices in the past so understanding what you should deploy early in your cloud journey is critical.

Vendors such as Barracuda recognised this early on and have extended their range of products to include cloud specific options that are quick to deploy and easy to manage from within the Azure Market place.