Cloud Migration for Small Businesses: Navigating the Complexities

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

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?

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

Many small businesses may not have in-house experts to navigate the complexities of cloud migration effectively. The lack of expertise can pose significant challenges, potentially leading to costly mistakes and disruptions in their operations. As a result, it becomes imperative for SMBs to consider expert assistance to ensure a smooth transition.

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 volumes, your company ends up paying more than needed.

To address this challenge, it is recommended to choose a tool like CloudFuze that can scale up or down with your specific business requirements, ensuring cost-effectiveness and efficiency in your cloud migration journey.

3. Navigating Diverse Cloud Migration Scenarios

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 diverse cloud migration scenarios is a significant challenge you must overcome. Before picking a data migration tool, ensure that it supports the migration between the cloud platforms you want to.

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. So, ensure that the tool migrates all the features of your choice.

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. 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.

7. 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 assistance 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 a managed migration service that also covers change management and user training.
• We offer flexible migration pricing plans that suit every company’s needs.
• We provide advanced security measures to help protect your confidential data during cloud migration.

For more information, contact our data migration team.