Cloud Office Migration Decision Points for SMBs

Like large-sized enterprises, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that are planning to migrate cloud offices must ensure they do not go wrong when making critical decisions that structure the overall migration project. With a series of right decisions, it becomes possible to strategize and perform the migration in a secure, swift, and non-impactful way.

As part of preparing your teams and stakeholders plan for the migration project, you can utilize this post as a starting point to understand the key areas of the migration where critical decision-making is required.

1. Choosing A Migration Provider That Caters to SMBs

As opposed to the standard and common way of exploring cloud office migration solutions provider and choosing one, your organization can take niche down and explore providers that specialize in SMB-level migrations. This way, it becomes simple for your IT team to ensure that the migration vendor can address your migration needs in ways that align with the processes that small and medium-sized businesses follow, such as SOW, pricing, and legal approvals.

With the alignment in how fast or slow processes move in your organization, it becomes easier for your IT team to collaborate with the migration vendor with any communication gaps. Counterintuitively, the migration vendor can ready the migration project as per your organization’s needle-movers. Apart from process alignment, also make sure that the migration vendor is capable on the technology side of things.

• Check if the migration provider’s tool implements industry-standard migration approaches, e.g., performing data read and write through the cloud APIs
• Check how the provider handles API throttling when the rate limit usage is exceeded during the migration
• Check if the migration vendor complies with industry-standard security regulations, such as having a SOC 2 Type 2 certification, adhering to the GDPR (for UK and European businesses), having ISO 27001 certification, and more

2. Reviewing Migration Commercials and Optimizing Them (If Required)

Another crucial decision point for SMBs revolves around the migration commercials. Compared to large-sized enterprises, many SMBs have limited bandwidth on the migration budget they can allocate and get approvals for. If your team faces a similar scenario, then make sure to carefully assess the pricing for the entire migration project that the migration vendor sends to your team.

There are several approaches your team can take to keep the migration cost in check, with one of the best options being optimization of the scope of work. To do this, perform a total assessment of all the user accounts and their content in your organization’s current cloud platform. Identify user accounts and their associated data that are no longer useful. This way, you can skip them and optimize the scope of work of the entire migration project.

3. Evaluating the ROI From the Migration

It is crucial to get a clear picture of how the ROI from the migration will look like, and the ways to quantify it. This is especially important if your team plans on using ROI projection to speed up the budget approval process from the finance team.

One of the simplest and straightforward ways to understand and quantify the ROI your small or medium-sized organization will get from the migration is the IT man-hours saved. By avoiding the manual approach of utilizing the in-house IT team to perform the migration, your organization can save a lot of IT man-hours by using a high-performance cloud office migration tool, such as our market-leading tool X-Change. And IT man-hours saved translates into IT operations costs saved.

4. Assessing the SLAs and Overall Migration Support Offered

A series of strategic decisions are needed when assessing the service-level and overall support that the migration vendor will provide your organization with. When reviewing the SLAs, make sure to check some of the areas where your teams are likely to need support:

• Migration manager (point of contact)
• Infrastructure/technology (point of contact)
• Escalation (point of contact)

Also, make sure to check the overall migration support available. If your organization’s IT team is inexperienced in cloud office migrations, it is best to opt for a white glove migration service, e.g., managed migrations, for end-to-end support.

5. Setting Up Processes for Change Management

Similar to decision-making in enterprise migrations, it is critical for SMBs to avoid going wrong when planning for change management. With proper change management processes in place, your team can ensure that the entire cloud office migration is performed smoothly for a seamless transition to the target cloud platform. This way, the end-users are less likely to get impacted.

Make sure to prepare resources for user training and target cloud onboarding as part of streamlining the change management processes. The smoother the transition to the target cloud your team prepares for the end-users (employees), the simpler it becomes to ensure operations continuity.