Cloud Migration: What Every Business Owner Needs to Know

In this blog, we will outline the benefits of cloud migration and the steps required to carry it out in your business.

Please note that not all IT providers have the same methodology, so some of the details here may conflict with the viewpoint of your current IT provider.

As always we suggest, when you are thinking of moving any of your business, IT infrastructure, or applications to the cloud, you should seek third-party advice from companies such as ourselves. That’s why we put this blog together in the first place.

We, tech professionals, value the agility, scalability, and security of a shift to the cloud, but company leadership is often focused on the bottom line. The initial cost of migrating may be a discouraging factor for some businesses. However, once migration to the cloud is complete, a company can see significant cost savings as well as a noticeable boost in productivity and efficiency. Here are more benefits your business can take advantage of from cloud migration:

What benefits will cloud migration bring to your business

Scalability.

Since it’s your ultimate goal, you need to be prepared for business growth. The cloud provides the ideal agility for your business to expand and gain an advantage over your competition because you won’t ever be slowed down trying to grow your business.

Automatic updates.

You don’t want to be stressing about updates when you have tons of other crucial things on your to-do list. The great thing about the cloud is that the updates are automatic with the latest technology meaning that you can also remove the headache of your IT maintenance and really focus on your business. If that wasn’t already enough, this provides you with a great competitive advantage because you will have access to enterprise-level technology regardless of your business size.

Security is taken care of for you.

All your data that is backed up in the cloud is stored in a safe and secure location that is protected from sudden power failures or other crises. With a click of a mouse, you can access any of your data, from any place, making your workflow smoother and easier.

Enhanced collaboration.

You will really feel the difference in flexibility as you use, edit, and share your documents. Across your entire business, no matter where your employee, partner, or customer are, you can work on the same document in real-time. Better collaboration like this will boost your work quality, streamline your document management and provide quicker workflows. When considering migrating to the cloud you have to consider collaboration because the cloud is not just about storing data and documents, it’s about connectivity and innovation.

Greater mobility.

Don’t tie down your business to a single location. Mobility will be your best advantage and the cloud gives you just that. There are huge benefits to reap from this, for example, accessing your files whilst performing on-field operations or collaborating with businesses from anywhere. In fact, having all your files and software accounts on your desk is really holding your business back from growth.

Saves you money.

The initial cost of migrating to the cloud may seem like a lot, however, there are great opportunities for your business to really save money. Firstly, you won’t need various hardware that takes a large chunk of your business budget. Cloud services will only charge a fixed monthly cost. What’s more is that you get to save on real estate costs such as rent, facility management, utilities, maintenance, and more.

8 Important factors every business owner needs to know before a cloud migration

1: Understand why the business is moving to the cloud.

There are multiple reasons for a migration to the cloud – it could be anything from the flexibility cloud computing brings or simply now is the best time to make a move as hardware is now out of date and too costly to upgrade

Whatever the reason, make it top of mind during and after the migration takes place.

2: SWOT Up

You need to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that a cloud migration brings.

What is your current technology stack? Can it be moved to the cloud? Are there complimenting cloud-based services that will provide the role in the new environment?

All these questions should be analysed in a SWOT analysis.

3: List out the apps.

All businesses have a range of apps they use on a regular basis. Some of these are very common, like Microsoft Outlook, which is easily supported in the cloud. However, there may be line of business apps that are less common – make sure your IT provider knows about all the apps you use in your business.

4: Budget

Once you have your priorities straight, it’s a good idea to look at the numbers of what it will cost to migrate your business to the cloud. By now, you know what you want to do and how you stand to benefit from it, so the obvious course of action is to determine how much it will cost.

All of this comes down to understanding your needs.

How much space do you need to get things done? What kind of data does your business generate? What types of service level agreements (SLAs) are you going to need to achieve your goals? Get some tangible answers to these questions, and you’ll be able to start shopping around for solutions that are a fit for your budget.

5: Choose the right IT provider

We might give you a bit of a red face here, but if you are reading this and your current provider has not suggested you move to the cloud, then questions must be asked.

Almost all IT providers in this day and age will agree that the move to the cloud makes perfect sense.

Look for an IT provider that has migrated other businesses similar to yours to the cloud. There are many unseen lessons a cloud migration makes on a provider, and your 1st question should be, “who else have you migrated to the cloud recently”.

6: Time the migration

The majority of migrations occur over the weekend and snagging/teething follow after the migration takes place.

Do make sure your migration takes place when there are no critical business activities are happening.

No matter how well versed an IT provider is in migrating businesses to the cloud, there is always room for error, and a certain amount of upheaval will occur.

Change always has some friction, but it will be smooth sailing once cloud services are embedded in your organisation.

7: Test your backups

If you follow our blogs, you’ll already know how important it is to backup your business data. You might be told you have a working backup solution, but when was the last time it was actually tested to see if the data was recoverable?

Test your backups before a cloud migration.