What SMEs should know when moving to the cloud

For several years, Peter Ambrose, MD of The Partnership, contemplated moving the 20 million files held by his business to the cloud.

Every evening, the 80 employees at the property law firm’s offices in London and Guildford would back up the day’s conveyancing documents, searches, emails and other correspondence to a huge bank of on-site servers.

“Each case generates about 160 documents,” he explains. “Every time we created a document, we stored it. We needed to back up our data and keep it safe because it is incredibly sensitive information that includes bank details and identity checks. My number-one concern – which literally kept me awake at night for years – was whether that data was vulnerable to a ransomware attack.”

Finally, after months of research and planning, in November last year, The Partnership migrated all archived and live case data to a cloud service. 

“It was scary – I’ll make no bones about it,” Ambrose admits. “Although we had done all the tests, until you’ve actually moved this huge amount of data, you worry about whether it’s going to work.”

The Partnership is one of a growing number of SMEs that have successfully moved their operations to the cloud. Another is Dakota Hotels. The luxury accommodation group needed a cost-effective cloud-based software solution that could be scaled up as the business grew. It also wanted to harness the potential of the cloud to help with the HR challenges that the pandemic had forced upon the hospitality sector. As an additional benefit, the company gained greater insights into its costs and commercial opportunities. 

“The time savings we’ve accrued by moving to the cloud have freed people up to focus on innovation,” says the company’s operations director, Andrew Ovenstone. “This has enabled our finance professionals to move away from number-crunching and become value creators.” 

All hotels under the Dakota brand compile their own profit-and-loss statements, which meant that a cloud-based solution would be an ideal solution to support multiple data entries. This has granted each hotel the autonomy to input data without compromising consolidation, reporting or intelligence at group level. 

For SMEs, there are several key factors to consider when contemplating a move to the cloud. The first of these is the issue of cost versus opportunity. 

“Cost matters for SMEs, but you also need to think about what moving to the cloud can enable for your business,” says Dr Antonio Weiss, senior partner at The PSC, a consultancy that helps providers of public services with their digital transformations.

“If you hold data and applications on your premises, you probably run quite a restricted service,” says Weiss, whose book, The Practical Guide to Digital Transformation, was published in February. “The cloud enables huge possibilities in terms of data processing and analysis. It also offers better security and improved performance for your customers and staff. So, while you should aim to keep costs low in any cloud transition, you need to focus on how it can make your business better and to ensure that you have a plan to capitalise on this.”

The second key factor to consider is flexibility. One of the challenges for The Partnership was to find a cloud provider that would store and register multiple versions of documents rather than providing a static record. This enables employees to return to the material and update it where necessary.

“We looked at Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, but found that they wouldn’t work for us,” Ambrose says. “We needed a system that could cope better with changeable data, which is why we partnered with Egnyte.”

The third consideration is the level of functionality required in the short, medium and long term. SMEs need to be realistic about what level of service and availability they are going to need, says Mairead O’Connor, executive for cloud engineering at AND Digital.