Implementing the Cloud in a Small Business: A Guide

cloud implementation
As a small business, your first priority should be security. Your early years will be the most fragile in terms of income, and so you will want to ensure that every penny counts. Losing information and data costs money: it will take time out of your working hours to recover it, and maybe even get back on your feet if it was the result of a cyber attack. So, here is how to implement the Cloud into a small business.

Change your mindset

Switching over to the Cloud requires a change in mindset in any business: big or small. You may have some employees who are reluctant to shift to virtual software or at least believe it’s not a valuable use of time to migrate the information over. It may be worth holding a meeting to explain the change in processes and why you are doing it.

Save money

The next part of the process is choosing a software option; however, you may wish to try and save money where you can, particularly as a small business. An easy way to do this is to go with a licensing reseller. These companies, www.bytes.co.uk, for example, are qualified to sell you a software program for a discounted price. They are also completely versed in how to use the software, so if you have any questions they can be contacted easily; you won’t have to go through the agonizing process of ringing the software manufacturer and putting up with on-hold music.

Data upload

This is when you finally upload all of your business’ data onto the Cloud. It might take a little while, as you will not only need to upload saved data but also users’ individual data. If you have far too much data to upload, you may need to decide on a cut-off point. For example, you may need to decide not to upload anything from before the year 2016.

Education and involvement

Here comes the tricky bit: training and encouraging all of your employees to use the Cloud computing service regularly. This will involve showing them how to safely upload their data and also reminding them not to rely on hardware. Once everyone is clued up on the new system, you can start to encourage remote working on both mobile and laptop devices.

Virus protection

Cloud software is incredibly secure, but always make sure that you have anti-malware software implemented too, just to be safe. You do not want cybercriminals to be able to extract passwords or valuable information that could give them access to your Cloud.

One aspect to be thankful for, as a small business, is that at least you will not have the same volume of data to process as a large-scale conglomerate. While uploading all your data onto the cloud may take some time, it certainly won’t be as tricky if you were a business three times the size. It will also make it far easier to get your team on board with the new processes.

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