Why small businesses should migrate to the cloud: Everything you must know

Cloud delivers services on the web. 

It helps small businesses with easy access to unlimited computing power. 

The cloud enables them to meet their IT infrastructure needs given the limited resources they’d have in the initial stages of their venture.  

It allows small business to co-exist and flourish in areas where previously, only big businesses could flourish.  

This flexibility has therefore made the role of cloud computing in small business indispensable. 

Role of cloud computing in small businesses

There are several roles cloud computing plays to help small enterprises thrive amid the competition.  

With cloud, businesses can flexibly share and access files, enable collaboration across teams, automatically back-up files and prevent data loss, use cloud servers to store files saving physical space, grow and contract as required, get access to high-speed servers and cybersecurity, and so much more.    

With so many advantages, cloud computing helps small business in ensuring business continuity with solutions ready at a fraction of the cost that keep up with the growth of your business.  

Most importantly, the cloud makes it easier for you to function smoothly during a crisis.  

What are the factors to consider before moving to the cloud?

Cloud migration is complex with many factors to be considered for proper execution.  

A cloud migration plan helps enterprises identify the best way to migrate their infrastructure to the 3cloud.  

Building a migration architecture: Before migrating to the cloud, your enterprise first needs to build a migration architecture.  

A migration architecture helps enterprises define their cloud requirements, plan resources and design strategies for cloud transfer.  

Developing a migration architecture requires a proper migration strategy that begins with an assessment and clear understanding of what you want to accomplish from the migration.  
 

Assessing your cloud fit: With several public cloud platforms, enterprises often find it difficult to choose one to migrate their critical applications.  

To ensure optimized performance of your enterprise’s applications, you should choose a platform that supports the technology you used to build your applications.  

So, whether you choose a single cloud or a multi-cloud platform, the first thing to do is assess the pre-requisites for the technology used in your applications.  

Your budget: For small businesses, it is essential to decide on an affordable cloud migration plan.  

For this, you must estimate the total cost of the resources and be aware of pricing for different cloud platform modules.  

You can even take help of a cloud planning service provider to do this for you. Nuvento’s cloud cost planning experts can guide you here. 

Right cloud provider: Choose the right cloud provider helps you benefit from your migration.  

So, you must analyze cloud providers based on technology compatibility, governance and business policies, service dependencies and partnerships, migration support, data security, certifications and much more.  

Security of confidential information: Data is a crucial business element and small enterprises need to ensure the safety and protection of its confidential information.  

So, organizations need to look through the security and regulations of a cloud provider before deploying applications on the platform.  

How to set up cloud computing for small businesses 

To ensure you have successfully moved to the cloud, you must have checked every step on the cloud migration process checklist.   

The process can be brought down to 4 major phases or some major requirements to move to the cloud: 

Phase 1: Plan and prepare your cloud migration journey 

In this phase, you can prepare a comprehensive analysis of your company’s infrastructure and its applications.  

You can even come up with solutions for problems in the migration process during the planning and preparation phase.  

It is in this phase that you may need a team of cloud experts to guide you and oversee the process. Nuvento’s cloud migration experts can help you through this process. 

Phase 2: Assessing interdependencies and deducing a migration method:  In this phase, you map interdependencies between your applications to identify the best methods to migrate them.  

The complexity of your applications and its importance is a factor determining the mapping process.  

The easiest way to the best results is to try new methods and test them on relatively unimportant and easy applications.  

Phase 3: Executing your plan: During the execution phase, you need to be careful about the exact steps and configurations.  

It is in this phase that you put in place your IAM, networking, firewall rules and service accounts, and ensure their appropriate configurations with your database, file shares, web servers, Active Directory and so on. 

Execution phase also includes logging and monitoring to ensure you application continues with the required performance.   

Phase 4: Review and plan optimization activities: This cloud migration phase involves period reviews and planning to optimize your workloads.  

This is when you resize your machine types and disks, use automation to reduce operational overhead, improve integration with logging, monitoring and alerting tools and adopt managed services to reduce operational overhead.  

Right–size your VMs and easily identify computing instances you need to pay for.  

Impact of cloud computing on small businesses 

Cloud computing is a powerful enabler of productivity for small businesses.  

While businesses of all sizes today are reliant on the cloud, it is for small businesses that the cloud has been a crucial impetus.  

Because before the cloud, small businesses would have to go through the trouble and expense of running their own on-premises IT infrastructure, as well as covering the cost of in-house IT staff, which would have been too much of a burden on them.  

Which brings us to the advantages of migrating to the cloud that helps small businesses: 

1. Lowers computing costs: Without the need for in-house computing resources, small businesses can potentially save costs since the cloud provider gives you the IT infrastructure, bears the costs of upgrades, new hardware and software and much more. 
2. Security for your data: Cloud providers implement baseline protections for their platforms and the data they process, such as authentication, access control and encryption. With additional supplement protection, enterprises can bolster cloud data protection. 
3. Scales as you grow: One of the benefits of migration to the cloud is how easily it accommodates fluctuating bandwidth demands. If your business demands an increase, you can easily increase without having to invest in physical infrastructure.  
4. Mobile access: You can access the data you need from smartphones and devices, keeping your entire team in the loop. Mobility of the cloud can help staff living a long way away from offices keep up to date with clients and co-workers.  
5. Control over data and activities: Cloud gives you control and complete visibility over your data. You can easily decide user access, control and even streamline work with complete visibility since your team know who is working on what. 
6. Disaster recovery: Storing your data in the cloud guarantees that your data is always available, even if your computers or any device you were working on is damaged. Cloud provides quick data recovery for all kinds of emergency scenarios and helps with loss prevention.  
7. Sustainable solution: Cloud addresses wastefulness at every level of your small business. Hosting on the cloud is more environment friendly and results in less carbon footprint.  
8. Competitive edge: Several businesses prefer to use on-premises infrastructure and it places them at a distinct disadvantage when competing with you who has cloud at your fingertips. If you implement a cloud-based solution before you competitors, you will be further along the learning curve while they’ll need to catch up.  

How Nuvento’s cloud services can help you 

Growing enterprises are recognizing how cloud computing can impact their productivity, collaboration, data security as well as revenue.  

By using a cloud-based solution, your growing enterprise can prevent several challenges that most organizations that rely on localized IT infrastructure have.  

So, to effectively adopt cloud for your business or learn how to make the most of your cloud investments, reach out to Nuvento’s cloud experts so we help you reach your cloud performance goals.