Cloud migration creates security gaps that most businesses don't discover until after an incident. Here are the five mistakes that come up in almost every review.
Moving to the cloud is one of the smartest decisions a growing business can make. It reduces infrastructure costs, improves collaboration, and gives your team the flexibility to work from anywhere. It's also one of the most common ways businesses accidentally create serious security gaps — because the migration itself gets prioritised, and security gets treated as something to sort out later. 'Later' is when attackers show up.
The most critical security layer in any cloud environment isn't the firewall or the antivirus. It's identity — who can access what, from where, and under what conditions. A cloud environment that isn't secured at the identity layer is effectively open. One compromised credential — one phishing email clicked by one staff member — can give an attacker access to your entire Microsoft 365 tenant.
Before migrating workloads, the minimum security baseline should include: MFA enforced for all users, Conditional Access policies configured, legacy authentication protocols disabled, and admin accounts separated from standard user accounts. Security should move first. Workloads follow.
Microsoft, Google, and AWS operate under a shared responsibility model. They secure the infrastructure — the physical data centres, the network, the platform itself. You are responsible for securing what you put on that infrastructure: your data, your user identities, your configurations, your devices.
Many SMBs move to Microsoft 365 and assume that because Microsoft is secure, their environment is secure. What Microsoft provides is a secure platform. What you build on top of it — and how you configure it — determines whether your environment is actually protected.
Cloud platforms are designed to work out of the box — which means their default settings prioritise ease of use over security. Common default-setting risks we find:
'But our data is in the cloud — isn't it automatically backed up?' This is one of the most common and most dangerous misconceptions. Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and most SaaS platforms do not provide full data backup and recovery by default. They provide availability — but deletion, ransomware encryption, and accidental overwrites are not always recoverable through native tools.
Many businesses discover their backup doesn't work when they need it most. That's not a recovery situation. That's a crisis.
Attackers who gain access to cloud environments often operate quietly for weeks or months — exfiltrating data, escalating privileges, or preparing for a larger attack — while the business has no idea. Without monitoring, you have no way to detect a threat until the damage is done.
A well-configured Microsoft 365 or cloud environment is significantly more secure than most on-premise setups a small business could maintain on their own. The key word is 'well-configured.' Security needs to be part of the migration from the start — not an afterthought once everything has moved.
We identify your top 3 risks and tell you exactly what to fix — no jargon, no obligation.
