At What Point Is a Cloud Service Good for a Small-to-Medium Business?

In the dynamic realm of business operations, your company might stand at a crossroads, wondering whether your traditional IT setup is up to scratch and ready for the future. Can your current infrastructure meet the demands of growing data volumes and evolving collaboration needs? The potential cost savings have a powerful attraction, but you might also have concerns about navigating unfamiliar territory, dealing with potential disruptions, and keeping your data secure. It's a balancing act between the comfort of the familiar and the potential for a journey into a more dynamic and efficient future.

Signs that your organisation should consider cloud services

So, when is the right time to make the switch? The answer varies for every SMB, but there are some warning signs to recognise that are universal, such as increased operational inefficiencies, rising maintenance costs, or a growing realisation that your current IT setup is blocking your business goals. Recognising these signs and understanding your unique business needs can help you pick the best moment to embrace the transformative power of hyperscaler cloud services.

Benefits of the cloud

Switching to a cloud service from a traditional IT setup offers many potential benefits. Whether fuelled by growing data storage demands, a push for collaborative and remote workspaces, or a more flexible and scalable infrastructure, this transition addresses diverse challenges. It's a strategic move that aligns with business growth, efficiency, and modernisation.

Steps to Adopting Cloud Services

What are our business needs?

For a successful migration to the cloud, Small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs) must perform a thorough assessment of their business needs. This evaluation should consider:

• General assessment of business needs: Thoroughly examine current infrastructure, applications, and data to identify migration suitability.
• Scalability requirements: Evaluate the scalability needs, ensuring the cloud solution accommodates the potential growth of the business.
• Performance expectations: Consider the expected performance outcomes and how the cloud service can meet or exceed these expectations.
• Security considerations: Prioritise security, assessing the cloud service provider's security measures to safeguard sensitive data.
• Alignment with Business Goals: Assess the potential benefits offered by the chosen cloud service provider in terms of your broader business goals, such as cost savings, improved agility, and enhanced collaboration.
• Regulatory Compliance and Data Governance: Understand and address regulatory compliance and data governance requirements to ensure adherence to industry standards.

A final, important (and often overlooked) step is to engage all relevant stakeholders in the assessment process, including IT teams and end-users. This helps you to form a holistic understanding of your business needs and supports all the previous considerations.

Choosing a provider

The selection of the right hyperscaler to partner with is a critical decision that should go beyond mere habit or preference, and the fact that you’ve been using a particular provider in the past doesn’t necessarily meet they’re the best fit. Whether it's AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, the differences in service offerings, global infrastructure, pricing models, and specialised tools can significantly impact how well they align with your specific business needs and objectives. The right hyperscaler can enhance scalability, security, and performance, making your cloud journey smoother and more effective.

Choosing a model

In order to better understand when and how to execute the move, you need a strategy for your migration to the cloud. The choice of model depends on factors such as the nature of the application, business goals, and the level of transformation the company is ready to undertake. Each strategy has pros and cons, and the optimal approach often involves a combination of these strategies based on the organisation's needs. Here are some common approaches:

• Rehosting (Lift and Shift): This is a straightforward approach where you move existing applications to the cloud infrastructure without making any changes. It's a quick migration method but may not fully leverage cloud-native features.
• Re-platforming (Lift, Tinker, and Shift): This strategy optimises applications to take advantage of cloud capabilities. It might involve slight modifications to improve performance or use specific cloud services.
• Refactoring (Re-architecting): This involves significantly changing the application architecture to leverage cloud-native features fully. It often means breaking down monolithic applications into microservices or using serverless computing.
• Repurchasing (Replacing): This involves discarding the existing application and purchasing a cloud-native one, such as moving from an on-premise Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to a cloud-based CRM.
• Retire: Sometimes applications that are no longer needed are retired or turned off.
• Retain: In some cases, keeping specific applications on-premise for regulatory or compliance reasons might make sense.

Tips for a smooth transition

While the transition to the cloud can be a windy road and every route is different, there are some general tips that you can follow to ensure a more comfortable journey:

• Start Small and Scale Up: Begin with a pilot migration or move non-critical applications first to gain confidence before full-scale migration.
• Regular Backups and Testing: Regularly back up data and conduct thorough testing to ensure functionality and data integrity post-migration.
• Monitor Costs: Keep track of cloud spending and optimise resources.

Navigating the complexities of preparing for your organisation's shift to a cloud service can be overwhelming. If the prospect of managing the entire process solo seems daunting, seeking expert advice is not just a wise move but a strategic one. Professional guidance can provide invaluable insights and streamline decision-making, saving time and resources. It could be the key to unlocking the full potential of your cloud journey.

Training your team

Ensuring your team is on board from the start is crucial, and the main part of that is to align everyone’s understanding of the technology. Shifting to cloud platforms requires new operational methods, so preparing your workforce should involve:

• Technical proficiency in utilising cloud platforms.
• Understanding new interfaces associated with cloud services.
• Grasping security protocols relevant to cloud computing.
• Proficiency in collaboration tools integral to cloud services.

Moreover, fostering a culture of ongoing learning with significant training investments will empower your staff to harness the full potential of cloud technologies. This approach greatly enhances the organisation's efficiency, agility, and tech proficiency.

Read more: Prepare your team for the cloud!

Cloud migration in practice

One of the commonest reasons that prompt a company to begin a journey to the cloud is that they realise their current IT infrastructure is holding them back instead of propelling their growth.

Consider a hypothetical mid-sized e-commerce company facing a surge in online traffic. In this imagined scenario, they acknowledge that their current infrastructure struggles with increased demand, leading them to consider a move to a hyperscaler cloud solution. This strategic choice enables them to seamlessly scale resources based on traffic fluctuations, enhancing a customer experience and potentially boosting sales.

In another common situation, a multinational corporation might be wrestling with the complexities of managing on-premise servers and ensuring global connectivity and switch to a hyperscaler cloud service for a more centralised and scalable solution. In this situation, the migration would facilitate smoother collaboration among international teams, improve data accessibility and provide a secure and cost-effective platform.

In both case, the process of recognising operational inefficiencies and limitations in the existing setups can help such organisations to plan a better migration, resulting in enhanced performance, scalability, and overall business agility.

Conclusion

Learning from these examples, we can see that transitioning from traditional IT to hyperscaler cloud services can streamline operations and enhance efficiency. This shift requires a comprehensive approach, whether prompted by evolving business needs or a desire for a more flexible infrastructure. Don’t forget that every organisation's journey is unique, and seeking expert advice can significantly contribute to the success of the migration.