5 Tips for Smoother Small Business Cloud Migration

Today’s small businesses are pursuing cloud migration to achieve greater efficiency, productivity, flexibility, and growth while lowering operational and capital costs (Capex and Opex). This is taking the form of cloud-based business productivity, collaboration and communications apps, to data storage, computing services, disaster recovery and beyond.Visit IT Services in Houston for more details

Over 73 percent of businesses already have at least one application, or part of their computing infrastructure in the cloud, according to the 2018 IDG Cloud Computing Study. Although cloud services can bring a wealth of advantages, realizing those possibilities requires careful planning. If your small business is in the consideration stage of moving apps and workloads to the cloud, here are five tips that can help to ensure a smooth cloud migration.

#1. Develop Clear Reasons/Goals for Cloud Migration

It’s important to first know why you want to migrate to the cloud based on what’s most important to your business needs. For many small businesses, moving common business productivity applications to the cloud is a priority. By 2021, 75 percent of the total cloud workloads and compute instances will be Software-as-a- Service (SaaS) according to the Cisco Global Cloud Index.

By moving business productivity, collaboration and communication applications to the cloud via SaaS, you gain more licensing cost control, scalability, remote access, and team collaboration. This often includes cloud applications like Microsoft Office 365 that can boost productivity and enhance collaboration while lowering costs and maintenance needs.

Many business applications and their associated workloads (the data they produce) grow as time goes by. With on-site servers and storage, the costs will continue to go up to meet the increasing need for networking, computing power, storage, and management costs.

By migrating them to the cloud, your small business can eliminate the on-site hardware, storage, and computing power of servers to gain true scalability on an as-needed basis through virtual servers. This move can also improve how applications work while lowering Capex since you’re only paying monthly fees for what you need. Cloud services also provide the best means of backup and disaster recovery by providing a cost-effective means by maintaining an offsite backup of all data and vital applications to keep the business running if systems go down.

#2. Know Your Exact Needs for the Cloud

Knowing your needs for the cloud will help you to form a cloud strategy that guides the what, when, and how of the cloud migration. This strategy brings together data management and in-house IT experts to analyze and determine migration:

  • Goals
  • Responsibilities
  • Phase dependencies
  • Business needs

While there are public, private, and hybrid clouds, most small businesses will be starting with the public cloud as the center of their cloud strategy. Public cloud refers to the model where cloud providers (AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure) own the servers and storage. Your business shares the same hardware, storage, and network devices with other businesses, and you access and manage your services using a web browser. 

#3. Conduct Survey of all Applications and Workloads

Many of the applications and workloads running on your in-house servers depend on other applications’ network connections and storage databases. Once you’ve developed a cloud migration strategy, you must survey all your applications, workloads, storage, and databases to determine how they are interdependent.Visit IT Services in Houston for complete details

#4. Prepare the Workforce for Migration Process

The cloud migration process can take days, weeks, months or longer depending on the scope of the migration, and it will affect each department in your business differently. This makes it imperative to have a change management plan to help everyone know what will happen, what the benefits will be, and what they will need to do during all stages of the migration process.Thanks for reading 3qube Consulting is provides IT Services in Houston ‘s article.

#5. Perform the Migration in Stages

The migration should be planned in stages (before, during, and after migration) for each workload moving to the cloud and the order in which they will be moved. Some applications can be easily moved to the cloud while others will require modifications to work properly, which takes longer and requires special tools. 

The workloads will need to be tested before they are brought online to make sure the servers, networks, and other services work with each other. There may be some downtime during the cutover phase, so this will also be part of the migration planning. Cloud services can have a major impact on a small business by:

  • Eliminating Capex costs for hardware and software and replacing it with lower monthly costs based on how much storage, and computing power you need
  • Lowering IT and administrative time and costs since cloud services providers and managed services take care of the day-to-day running and maintenance of cloud resources
  • Increasing flexibility, availability, mobility and collaboration

Preparation is the key to making all of this possible, so you need to have the best plan in place for a smooth cloud migration. The process can have a lot of moving parts, so the ideal scenario is to have the support of an experienced cloud migration partner. They can provide the expertise and cloud services to ensure the process goes smoothly and the outcomes are what you expect.3qube Consulting is provides IT Services in Houston .