It’s all about the data: Laying the right foundation for cloud success

By William Ercolano, Chief Technology Officer, Portfolio BI

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In today’s digital landscape, data is the cornerstone of every business decision, innovation, and competitive edge. At PBI, we often say: “It’s all about data!” 

But to truly harness the power of data, companies must first establish a robust cloud strategy and foundation. Without the right groundwork, cloud migrations can become expensive, inefficient, and vulnerable to security risks.

With a well-designed and thoughtful approach to cloud migration, fund managers can unlock valuable insights from their data while enhancing productivity across their organization. 

However, success in the cloud isn’t just about agility – it’s also about control. Implementing the right cost management strategies helps prevent unnecessary sprawl and keep expenses in check.  

Below we discuss how organizations can set themselves up for cloud success.

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1. Building a strong cloud foundation

Cloud migration strategy: Lift-and-shift vs cloud-native

One of the biggest decisions in cloud adoption is whether to lift and shift existing applications to the cloud as they are or redesign them for a cloud-native architecture.

Each approach has different cost implications, scalability benefits, and security considerations. Carefully assessing your organization’s needs will help determine the best path forward. Along with your timetable and return of value for each approach. 

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Cost controls: Keeping cloud spend in check

Cloud expenses can spiral out of control without proper governance. Organizations should:

• Implement cost monitoring and optimization tools
• Use reserved instances or autoscaling to manage demand efficiently
• Ensure finance and IT teams collaborate on cost transparency and budgeting
• Have proper separation and tagging in place to know where costs can be allocated per business unit.

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Upskilling your teams for the cloud

Your engineers and developers are the backbone of your cloud environment. Upskilling them in cloud-native technologies, security best practices, and automation is essential to maintaining a well-managed infrastructure.

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2. Security and resilience: The non-negotiables

Identity and access management (IAM) and zero-trust security

A zero-trust framework should be at the heart of cloud security. Key considerations include:

• Strict identity and access management to control who can access what and at what time
• Role-based access controls (RBAC) and multi-factor authentication (MFA)
• Continuous monitoring for suspicious activity.

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Disaster recovery and business continuity

Cloud outages happen – whether due to vendor disruptions, cyberattacks, or misconfigurations. To ensure resilience, businesses must:

• Design failover mechanisms across regions and even multiple cloud vendors
• Maintain independent backups, not just in the same cloud but in separate storage systems
• Regularly test disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity plans (BCP).

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3. Security frameworks and continuous testing

Are your security tools up to date?

Modern cloud environments require advanced security solutions, including:

• Endpoint detection and response (EDR/XDR) solutions
• Security information and event management (SIEM) tools that can aggregate and analyse logs from multiple cloud providers
• AI-driven penetration testing and security validation to proactively assess vulnerabilities.

At PBI, we leverage AI-based attack simulations to validate our own and our clients’ cloud environment, just as a real-world threat actor would.

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4. Data management and AI readiness

Securing data in the cloud

The integration of AI enables teams to work more efficiently, scale operations seamlessly, and maintain the highest levels of availability and continuity.  However, with the rise of AI-driven data analysis, ensuring data security and proper access controls is more critical than ever. Questions to ask include:

• Are internal permissions correctly configured to prevent unauthorized access?
• Have you evaluated how AI indexing affects sensitive data visibility?
• Are structured and unstructured data properly organized for analysis?

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Data accuracy and the human element

The value of data-driven insights is only as good as the quality of the data itself. Organizations should:

• Implement data governance frameworks to ensure accuracy
• Establish feedback loops to continuously improve AI-driven insights
• Consider human oversight to validate AI-generated recommendations.

For over 20 years, PBI has been at the forefront of cloud migrations, security, and data analytics. As a cloud-first organization, we don’t just advise clients. We navigate the same challenges ourselves while deploying our SaaS products like Axiom, Vector, and our AI-driven PBI Insights and Extract models tailored for financial data.

Cloud adoption is not just about moving workloads. It’s about building a future-proof foundation that maximizes security, efficiency, and data intelligence. Are you confident your cloud strategy is set up for long-term success?

Let’s talk. PBI is here to help.