What SMEs should know when moving to the cloud

For sev­er­al years, Peter Ambrose, MD of The Part­ner­ship, con­tem­plat­ed mov­ing the 20 mil­lion files held by his busi­ness to the cloud.

Every evening, the 80 employ­ees at the prop­er­ty law firm’s offices in Lon­don and Guild­ford would back up the day’s con­veyanc­ing doc­u­ments, search­es, emails and oth­er cor­re­spon­dence to a huge bank of on-site servers.

“Each case gen­er­ates about 160 doc­u­ments,” he explains. “Every time we cre­at­ed a doc­u­ment, we stored it. We need­ed to back up our data and keep it safe because it is incred­i­bly sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion that includes bank details and iden­ti­ty checks. My num­ber-one con­cern – which lit­er­al­ly kept me awake at night for years – was whether that data was vul­ner­a­ble to a ran­somware attack.”

Final­ly, after months of research and plan­ning, in Novem­ber last year, The Part­ner­ship migrat­ed all archived and live case data to a cloud ser­vice. 

“It was scary – I’ll make no bones about it,” Ambrose admits. “Although we had done all the tests, until you’ve actu­al­ly moved this huge amount of data, you wor­ry about whether it’s going to work.”

The Part­ner­ship is one of a grow­ing num­ber of SMEs that have suc­cess­ful­ly moved their oper­a­tions to the cloud. Anoth­er is Dako­ta Hotels. The lux­u­ry accom­mo­da­tion group need­ed a cost-effec­tive cloud-based soft­ware solu­tion that could be scaled up as the busi­ness grew. It also want­ed to har­ness the poten­tial of the cloud to help with the HR chal­lenges that the pan­dem­ic had forced upon the hos­pi­tal­i­ty sec­tor. As an addi­tion­al ben­e­fit, the com­pa­ny gained greater insights into its costs and com­mer­cial oppor­tu­ni­ties. 

“The time sav­ings we’ve accrued by mov­ing to the cloud have freed peo­ple up to focus on inno­va­tion,” says the company’s oper­a­tions direc­tor, Andrew Oven­stone. “This has enabled our finance pro­fes­sion­als to move away from num­ber-crunch­ing and become val­ue cre­ators.” 

All hotels under the Dako­ta brand com­pile their own prof­it-and-loss state­ments, which meant that a cloud-based solu­tion would be an ide­al solu­tion to sup­port mul­ti­ple data entries. This has grant­ed each hotel the auton­o­my to input data with­out com­pro­mis­ing con­sol­i­da­tion, report­ing or intel­li­gence at group lev­el. 

For SMEs, there are sev­er­al key fac­tors to con­sid­er when con­tem­plat­ing a move to the cloud. The first of these is the issue of cost ver­sus oppor­tu­ni­ty. 

“Cost mat­ters for SMEs, but you also need to think about what mov­ing to the cloud can enable for your busi­ness,” says Dr Anto­nio Weiss, senior part­ner at The PSC, a con­sul­tan­cy that helps providers of pub­lic ser­vices with their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tions.

“If you hold data and appli­ca­tions on your premis­es, you prob­a­bly run quite a restrict­ed ser­vice,” says Weiss, whose book, The Prac­ti­cal Guide to Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion, was pub­lished in Feb­ru­ary. “The cloud enables huge pos­si­bil­i­ties in terms of data pro­cess­ing and analy­sis. It also offers bet­ter secu­ri­ty and improved per­for­mance for your cus­tomers and staff. So, while you should aim to keep costs low in any cloud tran­si­tion, you need to focus on how it can make your busi­ness bet­ter and to ensure that you have a plan to cap­i­talise on this.”

The sec­ond key fac­tor to con­sid­er is flex­i­bil­i­ty. One of the chal­lenges for The Part­ner­ship was to find a cloud provider that would store and reg­is­ter mul­ti­ple ver­sions of doc­u­ments rather than pro­vid­ing a sta­t­ic record. This enables employ­ees to return to the mate­r­i­al and update it where nec­es­sary.

“We looked at Microsoft and Ama­zon Web Ser­vices, but found that they wouldn’t work for us,” Ambrose says. “We need­ed a sys­tem that could cope bet­ter with change­able data, which is why we part­nered with Egnyte.”

The third con­sid­er­a­tion is the lev­el of func­tion­al­i­ty required in the short, medi­um and long term. SMEs need to be real­is­tic about what lev­el of ser­vice and avail­abil­i­ty they are going to need, says Mairead O’Connor, exec­u­tive for cloud engi­neer­ing at AND Dig­i­tal.

“Pub­lic cloud plat­forms enable SMEs to occu­py the same play­ing field as big, cash-rich cor­po­ra­tions,” she says. “All com­pa­nies have been grant­ed access to tech­nol­o­gy such as machine-learn­ing tools. Only recent­ly, func­tion­al­i­ty of this sort would have been out of reach to all but the most well-fund­ed multi­na­tion­als.” 

But firms should not adopt such tech with­out first con­sid­er­ing their strate­gic direc­tion. Cloud trans­for­ma­tions are com­plex and, unless they are exe­cut­ed prop­er­ly, they can lead to seri­ous oper­a­tional inef­fi­cien­cies and data leak­age. Before part­ing with any mon­ey, CIOs and CEOs should take a step back and review their cur­rent busi­ness mod­el.

Ash Finnegan dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion offi­cer at Con­ga, an enter­prise cloud com­put­ing and data com­pa­ny, observes that a lot of SMEs have been rush­ing their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tions.

“Regard­less of their size, organ­i­sa­tions need to com­plete a thor­ough assess­ment and under­stand where they are with regard to their dig­i­tal matu­ri­ty today,” she says. “This involves analysing their cur­rent oper­a­tional mod­el, iden­ti­fy­ing strengths and weak­ness­es, and estab­lish­ing how they can bet­ter con­nect with their cus­tomers and serve them.”

The fourth key fac­tor to con­sid­er is the like­ly lev­el of ser­vice and tech sup­port required. Despite the hur­dles involved, migra­tion to the cloud can yield many ben­e­fits, as The Part­ner­ship and Dako­ta Hotels have dis­cov­ered. 

Using sub­scrip­tion cloud ser­vices elim­i­nates the need to main­tain and upgrade tech­nol­o­gy, which can be cost­ly and time-con­sum­ing process­es for SMEs. But it is vital to estab­lish exact­ly how much sup­port you expect from your cloud provider and to be real­is­tic about your own IT abil­i­ties.

The pro­vi­sion of ade­quate tech sup­port is key for small­er firms, stress­es Char­lie Daw­son, mar­ket­ing and chan­nel direc­tor at cloud provider Imscad Glob­al. “There will be some SMEs with the resources to sup­port their own cloud migra­tion and pro­vide ongo­ing sup­port, but they should ensure that the provider they choose offers a good lev­el of sup­port, includ­ing the abil­i­ty to have issues resolved using in-per­son com­mu­ni­ca­tion,” he says. 

Secu­ri­ty is the fifth major con­sid­er­a­tion. For Ambrose, his deci­sion to use a cloud ser­vice was prompt­ed by the ongo­ing chal­lenge of pro­tect­ing The Partnership’s in-house servers. Yet price and per­for­mance are often the first con­sid­er­a­tions for many SMEs, even though a loss of data could have cat­a­stroph­ic ram­i­fi­ca­tions. 

While fac­tors such as afford­abil­i­ty and capac­i­ty are clear­ly fun­da­men­tal, most cloud providers offer only the most basic secu­ri­ty fea­tures, espe­cial­ly at the bud­get end of the spec­trum, warns Trevor Mor­gan, prod­uct man­ag­er at data secu­ri­ty spe­cial­ist Com­forte.

“This sim­ply won’t be enough if your high­ly sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion – on your firm’s finances, intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty and cus­tomers – is des­tined for the cloud,” he says.

Con­cerns about reg­u­la­to­ry com­pli­ance will come to the fore here, espe­cial­ly for busi­ness­es in indus­tries that require very strict risk con­trols – for exam­ple, defence, health­care and finan­cial ser­vices. 

“Each par­tic­u­lar mar­ket will present dif­fer­ent con­straints, but com­pa­nies oper­at­ing in the same space may still have dif­fer­ent appetites for risk,” notes Dean Clark, chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer at dig­i­tal con­sul­tan­cy GFT Group. “The ide­al bal­ance between secu­ri­ty, com­pli­ance, cost and func­tion­al­i­ty will depend on the indi­vid­ual organ­i­sa­tion.”

SMEs should deter­mine whether the solu­tion they are con­sid­er­ing has the right lev­el of secu­ri­ty in place. Two-fac­tor authen­ti­ca­tion (2FA) should be a min­i­mum stan­dard, accord­ing to Lee Wrall, direc­tor at man­aged ser­vices provider Every­thing Tech.

“We’re see­ing that some cloud solu­tions are putting 2FA into their future roadmap, but we believe it should already be there,” he says. “For more robust infra­struc­ture require­ments, we’d rec­om­mend opt­ing for big­ger, more estab­lished solu­tions such as Microsoft or Ama­zon, as these pro­vide fea­tures such as secu­ri­ty, com­pli­ance and the abil­i­ty to scale up as stan­dard. For busi­ness­es using sim­pler cloud appli­ca­tions, the pri­ma­ry dri­ver should be func­tion­al­i­ty, fol­lowed by secu­ri­ty, com­pli­ance, scal­a­bil­i­ty and cost.”

Data­base require­ments con­sti­tute the sixth and final key con­sid­er­a­tion. In the cloud, stor­age capac­i­ty is one of the mea­sures that ser­vice providers use to charge for their offer­ing. If you do not have sig­nif­i­cant vol­umes of data, the cloud may not pro­vide val­ue for mon­ey.

“For any com­pa­ny that needs some lev­el of scale and avail­abil­i­ty, the cloud is usu­al­ly the best option,” says Andrew Oliv­er, senior direc­tor of prod­uct mar­ket­ing at Mari­aDB, an open-source data­base provider. “For a very small data­base with mere­ly inter­nal users, host­ing in house might be more cost-effec­tive if the com­pa­ny has the time and exper­tise – and a care­ful plan for off-site back­up.”