Suggestions for small and medium enterprises to migrate cloud computing

The advent of cloud computing is what makes companies look up, and if your business is considering using cloud computing, then you understand that more than one company in the market is thinking about cloud computing. A recent survey of 1000 Small and medium-sized enterprises by researchers at Marketbridge, a market research institute, found that 44% of respondents had deployed at least one cloud-based application system. In addition, more than 70% of respondents plan to migrate at least one new application system to the cloud within six months.

Why are so many small companies in favor of cloud computing?? According to Marketbridge's survey, 38% of SMEs said they were using cloud technology to help support their applications to a growing range of mobile devices. Other SMEs say the benefits of cloud computing cost savings, security, and ease of use are driving them to decide to migrate to cloud computing.

If your small company is considering or planning to migrate to cloud computing, this article gives a number of key points to help the migration process as smoothly as possible.

Start Small

"Careful testing and gradual migration to cloud computing seems to be the best way out," says Tyler Roye, senior executive officer of Mindshift, host company. Finding several applications that you can migrate to cloud computing will help you increase the confidence of your company's internal staff in cloud computing. "Once companies (and their employees) are familiar with cloud computing and see the benefits of cloud computing, they are often more willing to expand the scope of cloud computing."

So where should companies start? Paul Chisholm, chairman and chief executive of Mindshift, stressed: "It's fairly easy to migrate e-mail and general services to cloud computing." "Once companies are familiar with cloud-based e-mail, they can then use more complex cloud-based applications."

Don't stare at total cost of ownership (TCO)

"As we all know, cloud computing lowers your total cost of ownership compared to an in-house deployment scenario," said Robert Israch, head of global demand generation at NetSuite. However, this does not fully present the full benefits that cloud computing brings to your company. "The Israch advice is to focus on the overall return on investment for the small and medium-sized companies that are considering new cloud services, so that they can get a more accurate and comprehensive picture."

When deciding whether or not to deploy or expand cloud computing applications, he advises SMEs to consider "time and money spent upgrading different systems, maintaining hardware and servers, and integrating and patching different business systems," Consider the benefits of improving productivity by accessing real-time reports and dashboards and by giving your team access to the system anytime, anywhere. "Only by assessing all these factors will SMEs be more aware of the benefits of the pilot project and then decide whether to expand cloud computing to more departments and applications."

Adapting employees to cultural change

Sudden changes can scare employees – especially if companies require employees to abandon their familiar application systems and try out new applications. "Positive communication within the company indicates a change in service and an in-house training session that will help employees use new technology more skillfully," according to Google's small corporate blog. ”

If small companies gradually introduce cloud computing, allowing employees time to gradually adapt to new applications and get feedback from employees in a timely manner, they will find themselves deploying cloud computing systems more successful.

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First point: Don't let you scare away the security.

A survey by IDC, a market research firm, found that many companies that decided not to use cloud computing said safety was the main reason. But experts say cloud computing is safer than most people think. Mindshift, a senior executive of the managed computing provider, Tyler Roye, said cloud computing "is probably safer than the traditional small-business computing environment." "That's because small companies often don't have the same robust internal control and security procedures as host hosting providers, and if a small company has only one IT professional, it can't be compared."

"Cloud computing may be more secure than traditional it computing," says Google's blog, a small company. All this has to do with economies of scale-many of the old cloud providers employ top security experts, invest huge sums of money to protect the security of applications, and use resources that no small company can afford to develop technology. ”