This blog post was updated on July 25, 2024
It was originally posted on July 15, 2019
Does a Small Business Need The Cloud?
There are many strong arguments in favor of using the Cloud no matter the size or stage of your business.
Growing businesses can leverage the cloud to quickly scale their IT infrastructure on demand,
Large mature enterprises benefit from the cloud as it enables them to become more flexible, improving speed to market and response to changing customer demands.
For small businesses, the cloud helps keep costs down by minimizing physical storage, space, power requirements, and maintenance needs.
Although at times, the cloud can be more expensive, it makes up for it by delivering other, often more important, benefits, such as the speed of deployment and scalability. The cloud also offers businesses the opportunity to experiment and iterate before committing to huge capital expenditures.
In short, the cloud is a more affordable, faster to deploy, and more flexible option to the traditional physical IT infrastructure.
A Word Of Caution About Cloud Computing Services
Like many other technologies, the cloud requires careful thought and planning before adoption. Jumping headlong without a proper strategy can lead to massive failure instead of grand success. It is common to find businesses gunning down the wrong track or, worse, getting locked in unwanted services and contracts. There are quite a few things businesses should to assess and plan for before migrating to the cloud so that they can optimize performance, control costs and prevent vendor lock-in.
Here are 5 critical steps businesses need to take to build a cloud strategy:
A robust cloud strategy helps businesses anticipate the benefits and risks of the cloud, create a plan that best aligns with their business objectives, and come up with actionable steps for rapid execution.
1. Define How The Cloud Fits Your Business Strategy
A successful cloud journey begins with aligning business goals with the overall strategic business objectives. Start by reviewing existing IT infrastructure and systems to pin down the requirements and goals around specific business use cases. Then identify the teams or departments that you want to migrate to the cloud and break down their function into services. For each of these, you will have a specific business objective or goal. For example:
HR- attract, retain, and motivate my employees.
Marketing & Sales- Acquire, retain, and foster customer loyalty.
For each of the defined objectives, answer the following questions:
Can we become more operationally agile by delivering the service via the cloud?
Can we cut down costs by delivering the service via the cloud?
How will the adoption of the cloud impact staff resourcing?
Will the adoption of the cloud improve our operating efficiencies?
Does migrating the services to the cloud bring any other benefits?
Answering these questions will help you decide whether migrating to the cloud is worth the investment. It will also help you prioritize the services and functions for cloud migration.
2. Identify The Advantages Of The Cloud Your Business Can Leverage
The cloud offers several benefits, from reducing the total cost of technology ownership to improving the organization’s ability to respond faster to market opportunities. Understanding these benefits will help you plan your implementation better.
Here are the most common benefits of the cloud:
Increased efficiency
Migrating to the cloud helps your IT team transition from firefighting to fire prevention, i.e. they will have to dedicate less time to break-fix, allowing them to spend more time reducing IT security risks, improving productivity, and streamlining work processes.
Greater Scalability
For ages, businesses had to work around the limitations of their IT systems. IT resources have been rigid and inflexible and the employees have had to work around this limitation. But with the cloud, your IT will be able to work around your needs. You can expand at will, benefiting from faster rollouts, and greater flexibility on how, where, and on what devices you want to work.
Cost savings
As a result of the economies of scale, the typical cost of cloud computing per user, per computer, and per server is lower than that of traditional physical infrastructure. This is because resource allocation, optimizations, and maintenance are better managed by the service providers. In addition, you have the option to expand at will, paying for only what you use, so you don’t have to make any large purchases, tie up precious capital, or have machines sit idle.
Cost planning
Budgeting for IT and cost planning is easier with the cloud since you will know how much you will pay monthly. Typically, this is either a flat monthly fee or usage-based; either way, you can plan your monthly bills better. You won’t have to deal with separate utility bills, large capital expenditures, software/hardware updates, or maintenance expenses. This ability to better plan your costs allows you to better allocate your resources where they are most needed.
Better Protection
The cloud facilitates automation in user and infrastructure management. This brings along improvements in cybersecurity making your IT infrastructure safer, and more reliable. Your IT team will have more options for data duplication, backup, and data recovery.
3. Evaluate How Ready Your Business Is To Migrate To The Cloud
In this step, what you need to do is to figure out how much preparation your business needs for migrating to the cloud. Although every organization can benefit from the cloud, but they need to be prepared for the transition and your company may not be ready for it yet. For example, your business may be governed by external legislation on data security and privacy, which mandates keeping the data in-house. In such cases, you will need to decide which functions and services you can migrate to the cloud and which you must retain on-site.
A large number of new clients we onboard suffer from significant “technical debt”, which is a side effect of making expedient decisions and taking shortcuts. The resulting infrastructure is plagued with inherent issues, requiring frequent maintenance, and results in declining team productivity. For these organizations, migrating to the cloud offers an opportunity to shed their technical debt, reconfigure, and consolidate their IT infrastructure.
At this point, it is also prudent to check that your internal SLAs (service level agreements) are aligned with the Uptime and Restore Time targets for the applications and services offered by the cloud vendors.
Think about what would happen in case of a disaster. If you lose connection to the internet and consequently the cloud, how will you get your business back to the current working level? It is always useful to discover what your foundations are before starting to build any more systems onto the existing infrastructure. This way you will know how much work will be required to make your organization cloud-ready.
4. Select The Right Type Of Cloud Service
Moving to the cloud isn’t an all-or-nothing deal. You don’t need to rip out your existing servers. In fact, they can come in handy if you are thinking of hybrid clouds. Your choice of the type of cloud is typically governed by internal SLAs, security, and cost considerations.
There are three main types of cloud to choose from - public, private, and hybrid. Each one comes with its pros and cons.
Public cloud
The public cloud is an off-premise multi-tenant solution. It is easy to use and access from internet-connected devices and users don’t have to jump many hurdles to access the services. Public clouds are highly flexible allowing you to easily add or drop capacity. This elasticity also contributes to its cost-effectiveness as they usually operate a pay-as-you-go model.
Public clouds can suffer from outages, are less secure, and may be more susceptible to cyberattacks. So if you are relying solely on the public cloud, your cybersecurity, data backup, and business continuity need to be on point.
Private cloud
Private cloud services aren’t shared and are developed specifically for your organization. These can be maintained onsite or in a privately hosted data center. This gives you greater control over your cloud infrastructure and stored data. In addition, private clouds have stronger SLAs, hence increased reliability. While the cost of private clouds is higher, it is more secure than public clouds.
Hybrid cloud
Hybrid cloud means two or more clouds connected to support load balancing between private in-house resources and virtualized resources in the public cloud. It allows you to create an ideal configuration, balancing cost and security. You get the advantage of the cost-effectiveness of the public cloud and enjoy the security of the private cloud.
Hybrid cloud environment also includes multi-cloud model, which uses cloud services from more than one public cloud service provider within the same IT infrastructure. For example, an organization could use Amazon Web Services (AWS) for data storage, Microsoft Azure for backup and disaster recovery, and Google Cloud for development and testing.
5. What are the potential risks of the cloud?
Data is the most critical resource for your business so you need to be extra careful when moving your data to the cloud. Moreover, security and compliance regulations govern how you store and who has access to the data. So, it is important to clearly understand the terms of your cloud service provider.
Although, in most cases, you should always own your data stored in the cloud. It is best to check the terms and conditions of your contract to ensure your ownership of the data. Your service provider must not be able to access, use, or share your data. Additionally, you also need to have a secure way to recover the data on demand.
At this point, you need to figure out your security architecture, including least privilege and zero-trust security, in addition to data backup and business continuity plans.
Implementing the cloud strategy
Whether you are a Tech Startup, Non-profit, Healthcare provider, Professional Services, or any other business, you will definitely want to adopt cloud computing- at least in part if not completely. The goal of using the cloud is to help you focus on your core business by minimizing the IT obstacles associated with growing IT infrastructure. With the adoption of the cloud, your company will become more agile as you will be able to re-provision, add, remove, or expand IT infrastructure resources with ease.
The implementation time and complexity of your cloud strategy will depend on factors that are intrinsic to your business. The most important being:
The number of services to be migrated to the cloud, and
The level of compliance required.
Your first step should be building a clear roadmap with a defined timeline and milestones. Like any other service, you will also need ongoing support for cloud services. With the right plan in place, your existing IT team or a Managed IT Services provider can help you manage, customize, and scale your set of cloud services at a fraction of the cost of physical IT infrastructure.
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