Cloud Migration for Small Businesses: Navigating the Complexities

Are you a small business owner planning for a cloud-to-cloud or on-prem-to-cloud migration but unsure of proceeding due to the underlying challenges? Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) indeed face the brunt of a competitive and ever-transforming digital landscape than highly established enterprises.

Despite the wide range of cloud benefits, including high efficiency, cost optimization, and flexibility, you might face several roadblocks to your cloud adoption journey.

This post outlines a list of common challenges during cloud migration for small businesses and how to overcome them.

List of Challenges During Cloud Migration For Small Businesses

1. Lack of Experts

As a growing SMB, your company might need a technically sound expert team specializing in specific cloud technologies. To perform a cloud-to-cloud migration, your internal team must be proficient in handling both the source and destination cloud environments.

Training existing employees or hiring new members for the migration team is often not feasible due to budget and time constraints. This delays or restricts small companies from achieving their cloud migration goals.

2. Scalability

Sometimes, you face scalability issues when deciding to proceed with cloud migration. Not every data migration tool offers the flexibility to scale up or down according to the business requirements. Due to fixed plans that handle specific data volume, your company ends up paying more than needed.

3. Unique Migration Needs

Each cloud migration scenario is different from one another. For example, some businesses might need cloud-to-cloud data migration like Egnyte to Google Drive or Box to SharePoint Online.

In other cases, companies might need email migration services, or message data migration (For example, Slack to Teams migration) services as standalone or combined services.

Failing to meet the unique needs during cloud migration for small businesses is a significant challenge you must overcome.

4. Transferring File Features

A small or medium business might not have enough resources to migrate file features from one cloud to another. For example, to maintain 100% data replication from the source to the destination cloud, you must migrate file features like permissions, version history, comments, timestamps, etc., along with the data.

When your organization fails to meet this requirement, it leads to incorrect or corrupted data that does not add any value to the business.

5. Change Management

Cloud migration does not end once you migrate data from the source to the destination. Your company must prepare to execute change management initiatives before and after migration. Adapting to the organizational shift, communicating with stakeholders, and training end users in the new cloud platform are some approaches to managing change.

But as an SMB, your internal team can sometimes lag in the change management initiatives, which creates complexities.

6. User Training

Your company must train its users in the new cloud platform by scheduling demos or offering effective boot camps to get familiar with it. Only after this can you begin reaping the cloud benefits.

But there are times when your business cannot train every employee in the new cloud platform due to cost or time factors. It can become a big challenge for your company, delaying cloud adoption and affecting business outcomes.

7. Migration Cost

As an SMB your business cannot accommodate expensive yearly subscriptions to data migration tools. It is true, especially when you require a one-time or ad-hoc based migration. With no flexible migration plans, it can become quite difficult for your firm to bear the migration cost. This eventually deters your move to the desired cloud.

8. Security

Employing third-party security initiatives becomes cumbersome and costly when manually performing cloud migration. But failing to encrypt data, authenticate cloud sign-ins, or comply with data security regulations can put your company’s data at risk.

Data threats and non-compliance to security standards are some of the most notable complexities that small organizations like your business face while migrating to the cloud.

In order to navigate and overcome these issues, you must have a detailed migration plan and strategies in place. Additionally, you must partner with reliable data migration service providers like CloudFuze to handle all the migration responsibilities.

CloudFuze provides end-to-end cloud migration for small businesses and large enterprises.

• We have a team of data migration experts with a proven track record of successful cloud migrations for global clients.
• We can effortlessly scale up or down based on real-time data migration needs.
• We help address the unique migration needs of every business by thoroughly understanding their requirements.
• We seamlessly transfer the associated file features of the data for precise data replication across the source and destination clouds.
• We provide managed migration service that also covers change management and user training.
• We offer flexible migration pricing plans that suit every company.
• We provide advanced security measures to help protect your confidential data during cloud migration.

For more information, contact our data migration team.