Small business hears about putting everything in “the cloud” all the time. While that essentially boils down to working with the Internet (and we know the opportunities are immense), it does also come with its own set of issues and challenges in relation to cloud hosting for small business.

The cloud, basically is the delivery of hosted services over the internet, through a network of remote servers. These remote servers are busy storing, managing, and processing data for clients.

Though the opportunities are great, the cloud computing explosion hasn’t come without its own issues and challenges for small business. Let’s examine the main ones.

Too few resources

Small businesses are increasingly placing more workloads in the cloud while cloud technologies continue to rapidly advance. Due to these factors, businesses are having a hard time keeping up with the necessary tools and IT expertise..

The good news is that increasingly there are tools that can help including ones which monitor usage patterns of resources and automated backups at predefined time periods. These tools also help optimse the cloud for cost, governance, and security.

Security

Security has been a valid concern but luckily security capabilities are constantly improving. To ensure your organisation’s privacy and security is intact, verify the SaaS (Software as a Service) provider has secure user identity management, authentication and access control mechanisms in place. Also, check the data security and privacy laws they work under.

Governance and control

To reduce any risks and uncertainties in transitioning to the cloud, IT must adapt its traditional IT governance and control processes to include the cloud. To this effect the role of central IT teams in cloud has been evolving. As well, third-party cloud computing/management providers are progressively providing governance support and best practices which is good news.

Performance

When a small business moves to the cloud it becomes dependent on the service providers. This means when your provider is down, you are also down. Make sure your provider has the right processes in place, including alerting you if there is a problem and giving you a real time assessment of when it will be resolved.

Usage is segmented

Many small businesses don’t have a clear cloud adoption strategy in place when they move to the cloud. Instead, they embrace ad-hoc strategies which can lead to issues. They include:

• Isolated cloud projects lacking shared standards
• Ad hoc security configurations

• Lack of cross-team shared resources and information.

Make sure your business is protected against potential issues when moving to the cloud.  Speak with Ginko IT about how to make a smooth transition.