Discussions about the cloud have been very intense for the last few years, and besides large companies even small businesses are convinced of its benefits. They try to optimize growth while keeping costs under control. Many of them responded to the promising offers of IT companies, but were not satisfied with the results. Why? Where did it go wrong and what should small businesses consider before deciding to migrate to the cloud?
Right off the bat, it should be said in the Czech Republic, an organization with less than 250 employees and a turnover of less than 50 million euros is considered a small to medium-sized enterprise.
Such entities constitute over 90% of enterprises. What does this mean? That these companies for the most part do not have an IT team to solve regular technical requirements and thus streamline their operation and development.For this reason, they rather use external services. However, they usually only perform website modifications, occasional management and updates on devices or approaches and do not possess enough competence to assess whether the company is ready to migrate to cloud and whether it will meet the expectations, including flexibility and reduction of financial costs.In addition, some companies decide to migrate to the cloud because it is trendy and they do not even debate the suitability of this solution with the virtual server operator. Then they are surprised by the high costs and the fact that they don’t actually use the cloud that much…
Planning is the key – technology and business should be in harmony
The benefits of the cloud are well known, but in order for smaller businesses and organizations to take full advantage of them, everything needs to be carefully considered and planned before going through migration of data and applications, and the company’s processes, priorities and business strategy reviewed. And you shall know answers to following questions:
- Are you developing a new product or application and need testing and launching more easily and quickly?
- Do you want to move from many different repositories to a single central one?
- Do you want to prevent the re-storing and transfer of company data to private hardware?
- Do you require flexibility?
- Are you going to cooperate with an external entity?
- Do you want to cut costs?
Yes, there is a lot to think about, but then you will know the key data and how to use the cloud.
When is the high time to move to the cloud?
Did you store your data in a datacenter?
There was a time when datacenters were a great solution, but now they lack the flexibility offered by the cloud. With scaling and instant response to current availability requirements with no downtime, you can have almost unlimited storage.
Do you have your own hardware?
It, however, requires regular maintenance and costly renewals, licensing and, of course, updates. Despite all this, a technical issue may destroy all the data and their recovery will fail. Due to continuous automatic backups, this does not happen with the virtual storage.
Are you planning a merger or a wider collaboration with another company?
In such case, linking the data is complicated. Each company uses different solutions and to reconcile the approaches and availability often proves difficult. Moving and linking key data and applications in the cloud is the fastest way. Teams on both sides will gain access and can continue working without any problems.
Do you expand cooperation with external teams and entities?
Due to the accessibility of data stored in one place, your team can operate from all over the world.The cloud also allows you to set access levels, so external collaborators only get access to the data and applications they need for their work. In this way, any loss of key data is easily avoided. In this way, any loss of key data is easily avoided.
Thinking of migrating to the cloud, but not sure if it’s the right solution for you? Do you have questions about your current settings and their optimization? Let us know…
