Making the move
to the cloud
An e-Book for SME’s
With daily reports of large enterprises making “the move to the cloud” and cloud services and
applications dominating the business and technology media, it’s easy to assume that that
everyone has jumped on the cloud bandwagon. That’s of course if, as a business, you can actually
navigate past all the tech jargon to arrive at a clear understanding of what “the cloud” is and
what benefits such a leap may have for your day to day operations and future growth.
 01306 873900  020 8337 2700
 www.shiftf7.com
 [email protected]
Introduction
Leading information technology research and advisory company Gartner recently
released their 2015 predictions “Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic
Technology Trends for 2015”, with cloud/client computing making the list for the
sixth year in a row.
Gartner’s predictions come as no surprise to us. We are Shift
F7, a UK-based IT support partner specialising in providing
monitoring, support and training to small and medium
enterprises, particularly those businesses delivering
professional services. One of the top questions we get from
SME’s daily is “should we be considering a move to the
cloud?”
We’ve developed this guide in order to help our existing
customers and other SME’s to gain an understanding the
cloud, the business benefits it can offer them, and ways to
address the concerns and issues we’ve heard from businesses
that are contemplating making the move. Read on to get
some inside information, and feel free to contact us at
[email protected] with questions at any time.
What is “The Cloud?”
The term “The Cloud” traditionally refers to cloud computing, which refers to any service that is
delivered over the Internet. This differs to a traditional hosted model, where businesses host the
applications themselves and which are not available via the Internet.
Services delivered “in the cloud” are fully managed by the provider, whereas hosted services may
be maintained onsite. When businesses refer to moving to the cloud, they may be referring to
moving all operations to the cloud so that even day to day operational tools like email become
cloud-based, or they may be referring to the deployment of some key cloud-based applications.
Some business use a mix of both.
SME’s Top Concerns: Moving to the Cloud
It’s comes to no surprise to us that while business leaders recognise the possible benefits of
moving to the cloud, they are also very aware of the risks such a move could have on day to day
operations.
Even large enterprises are concerned over the operational and security risks of large-scale
infrastructure based move such as cloud adoption. They know as well as SME’s do that running
a business and changing a business are very different things.
In the next section of the guide, we share with you the top five concerns SME’s we’ve spoken to
have had over cloud adoption.
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1. Lack of in-house skills to facilitate cloud migration
The concern we hear most often from SME’s is that, despite moving to the cloud
being a high priority, many companies feel their IT departments lack the skills to
manage the move. This is concern not exclusive to SME’s – even large corporations
are often lacking the all the necessary skills to consider moving applications away from a
traditional server environment.
The problem with delaying a move to the cloud is that it can put companies behind competition
in terms of being able to streamline operations and work more efficiently.
So don’t let lack of in-house skills delay a move to the cloud if it’s what you want to accomplish.
Appointing a good outsourced IT partner to manage the move for you, or to work with your inhouse IT staff to facilitate the move is a great way to ensure cloud adoption happens smoothly
and successfully.
2. Value for money
It’s a sensible question because the move to the cloud does not happen without an in-house IT
investment or without engaging with an IT support partner, but we’re pleased to have found that
all of our customers, big and small, have always found the investment in the cloud to be worth
it.
For example, we work with SHINE, a charity that helps
disadvantaged children and teenagers to recognise and
then realise their academic potential. Like many very small
businesses, SHINE wondered if a move to the cloud was
excessive and would represent good value for money.
However, SHINE was able to implement a flexible, cost effective infrastructure that met its needs,
and one that can scale easily. Everyone is now able to work and collaborate remotely, which is
much more cost-effective in terms of our time. That three hour return train trip from Surrey to
London can now be used as productive working time rather than travel time lost.
For a charity, where many of the employees are not full time, making the move to the cloud
has been great value for money because it means that time which was once wasted can
now be applied to projects no matter where the SHINE team is working that day.
3. Scalability and Flexibility
Scalability is one of the most attractive reasons to make a move to the cloud. SME’s are often
concerned about the time and cost it will take to scale from an IT perspective both when growing
the business. The customers we’ve dealt with are concerned over the capacity of their legacy, inhouse systems to meet the IT demands of larger teams.
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In addition, as businesses look to become more global, the idea of having a cloudbased infrastructure makes more sense from a cost point of view. Using cloud
services, businesses do not have to replicate the hardware required to run a whole
new offices.
A growing, geo-located business can scale up (or down, as the case may be) quickly
using cloud services, only paying for the use and services they require.
4. Security
As we hear report after report of cyber attacks, we get concerned calls from SME’s looking for
an IT support partner that can offer them constant monitoring and increased protections.
Businesses of all sizes are concerned about securing both their customer and employee’s private
information, and maintaining operation of business critical systems.
“According to a recent survey from
Microsoft, businesses who use cloud
spend, on average, 32% less time
during the week managing security
than those who don’t. And 35% of
companies claim higher levels of
security and spend less on fighting
Many businesses also have compliance
guidelines to meet, so being able to
demonstrate that adequate security
measures are in place is essential.
Despite an outdated, but still fairly
widespread belief that having an onpremise, hosted infrastructure is a more
secure option for businesses, we believe
that cloud providers are able to offer an
equally secure offering.
malware”
Due to the recent cyber attacks, cloud
providers are in the spotlight and have
everything to lose when it comes to
security. With good investment and the best talent and processes backing them, cloud providers
are in the best possible position to offer a secure environment for their customer’s information.
5. Delays Caused By Cloud Adoption
Companies’ concerns over the delays caused by adopting a cloud based model are usually twofold. First, they are concerned about the actual switchover from an onsite hosted model to a
cloud based model.
It is true that making infrastructure changes may increase risk of a slight downtime, but we have
found that when companies take the time to create and exercise a detailed switchover
programme backed up by the right know-how, cloud adoption can be relatively painless. As a
dedicated IT support provider, we work with SME’s to ensure little or no downtime to operations,
and a seamless switch between an onsite hosted model and a cloud model.
It’s important to note that companies with onsite hosted systems may in the long run experience
more downtime overall simply due to the high level of maintenance many in house systems
require. With onsite hosted systems, without the proper IT support, a company is always at risk
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of being behind on updates and upgrades, which means that features can stop
working and cause long delays in day to day operations.
Having to manually do the updates and upgrades themselves means that IT staff
often spend precious hours running and maintaining the software instead of
spending time on supporting IT activities that can contribute to business growth.
With cloud-based applications, patches, updates and upgrades are sometimes applied
automatically, or in other cases offered in such a way that systems administrators can apply them
across an entire company, meaning the burden of maintenance from this point of view is
removed from a company’s IT resource. It also means that companies are secure in the fact they
are using the latest, most up to date version of an application.
6. Lack of Employee Cloud Skills
Beyond operational delays, companies are concern about the
cultural shift to the cloud, and whether employees will be able to
adapt to what some feel is a whole new way of most cloud-based
applications do not usually require any skills not already obtained
by learning to interact with the Internet. Beyond that, the cloud
is designed to make things simpler, not more difficult.
Applications are easily available online, and file sharing and
collaboration based cloud applications like Sharepoint are
designed to streamline day to day tasks. So rather than emailing
versions of shared documents around, employees can use a check
in system that features version tracking.
The workplace and indeed the workforce of the future is
becoming highly dispersed. Businesses are hiring contractors and
freelancers more than ever before, and with flexible working
legislation being introduced in the UK in early 2014, employers
are beginning to see they need to extend their IT infrastructures
absolutely to support the workers working off-site and on the go.
In a traditional, hosted model of IT, users are unable to access essential systems unless they are
physically present and using their desktop computers.
But using cloud-based services for email, CRM, and web-based for content and document
management, employees are now able to work from anywhere. A move to the cloud may require
a bit of a different approach to working, but the learning curve does not normally stand in the
way of companies successfully moving to the cloud and having it begin to support day to day
operations quickly.
Are you ready?
With a successful move to the cloud, you’ll be well-positioned to capitalise on market
opportunities and grow your business. Use our cloud readiness checklist on the next page to help
you assess whether you’re ready to make the move.
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Your Cloud Readiness Checklist
 Have you compared cloud service providers? Each company has different requirements
when it comes to a supporting infrastructure, and it’s important to have the right
resource in house or via an outsourced IT partner in order to evaluate service provision.
Do you have specific data location requirements, unique functionality or support needs,
and are there are investors who might also need to be involved in assessing provision?
 How extensive are your data migration requirements? One of the biggest areas many
companies overlook when attempting to move to the cloud is the complexities
surrounding data migration. It’s essential that companies create a detailed data migration
plan as part of cloud deployment.
 Do you have the time and resource to test your deployment? If your business does not
have the resource to incubate a cloud instance in order to test it, it is advisable to seek
an outsourced partner who can do this for you.
 You’ve got an IT team, but do you have a project manager to help make the move? An
in-house IT team may be able to take on many of the tasks associated with moving to the
cloud, but it’s important to have a project manager in place in order ensure that the
technical decisions being made match the goals of the business today, and for the long
term plas for growth the business has established.
 Have you checked your IT security measures lately? Are they good enough? A move to
the cloud won’t protect you from everything, and there is likely still to be some data saved
locally. As a business, it is important to have the right, most up to date virus protection
in place, and to ensure staff are trained on best practice.
 Do your employees need training? With the recent surge in Office 365 and associated
Office installations there has been a marked increase in requests for basic training in the
products. Do you need an IT support partner that can also provide training?
 Have you made a post-move plan to take advantage of the efficiencies introduced by
the cloud? A successful move to the cloud means that your IT staff will spend much less
time doing manual updates to software and resolving hardware issues. This means they
are ideally positioned to move to tasks that foster business growth and affect the bottom
line. This is an exciting prospect but don’t wait until the move is complete to make plans.
The move to the cloud need not be time consuming and the business may be well
positioned to grow sooner than you think. Get your IT team involved.
If you’d like to know more about Shift F7 and how we can help with your move to the Cloud,
visit www.shiftf7.com, email [email protected] or call us on 01306 873900 or 020 8337 2700
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