What are the Common Barriers to Cloud Adoption by SMBs?

May 6, 2022
Jhansi Rani
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Published On May 6, 2022

Organizations are starting to realize that the cloud enables business transformation for innovation and growth. As business leaders pivot quickly to deliver new cloud-based business models, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) face barriers to cloud adoption. As they adopt a cloud model, companies will need a business-outcome-driven cloud adoption strategy, a robust governance plan, and a practical risk management approach that helps balance innovation versus risk. Business leaders must plan to acquire and manage talent as part of their talent strategy to drive business success with Cloud Migration.

However, SMBs have traditionally been reluctant or slow to adopt cloud technology. While some SMBs realize the value of moving their business processes to the cloud, many still face barriers to cloud adoption. There are concerns around security, costs, skilled resources, and maintenance efforts which disproportionately burden small businesses that cannot afford dedicated IT teams to manage everything. However, many SMBs still don’t recognize that the cloud can reduce the effort and costs of managing data security, hardware costs, and the need for a dedicated IT team.

Common Barriers to Cloud Adoption

Security Risks

While all organizations face the risk of cyberattacks and data breaches, SMBs are particularly vulnerable. Research shows that 43 percent of cyberattacks target small businesses.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that security is one of the top barriers to cloud adoption for SMBs. Moving information outside the business premises can be a difficult decision regarding data security. However, keeping data stored in a hard drive can lead to severe consequences as several hard drives crash or get destroyed, and the estimated costs of these failures are in billions. SMBs are also highly vulnerable to ransomware attacks by relying on on-premise servers and hardware.

A cloud provider can prevent data breaches through strong firewalls, penetration and vulnerability testing, and encrypted storage, crucial in preventing cyberattacks.

Finding Skilled Resources

Another significant challenge that SMBs face is finding qualified and trained employees to manage their IT applications. SMBs must find a cloud provider with data centres managed by experienced IT personnel dedicated to maintaining their customers’ IT applications and software to address this. Additionally, IT and business leaders must build strategies that foster a culture of continuous learning and cloud skills readiness.

Routine tasks like bug fixes, periodic software updates, and other maintenance issues take time and effort. Instead of having in-house resources for everyday maintenance activities, SMBs should select cloud providers that can fully support their cloud maintenance needs.

Budget Constraints

Additional costs are always a concern to businesses but moving to the cloud significantly lowers the operational costs for small businesses. Instead of purchasing in-house hardware that requires regular investment in maintenance and trained IT personnel, cloud providers pool their resources to build large-scale data centers and lower costs through economies of scale for their SMB customers. Although moving to the cloud may come with small upfront costs such as installation or migration, it will reduce costs for small businesses in the long run.

Small businesses that let concerns around security, maintenance, and costs prevent them from moving their operations to the cloud are at risk of lagging as their competitors embrace the cloud and drive digital transformation. Identifying the right cloud provider who can offer secure data protection, efficient server maintenance, and a low subscription cost can eliminate the stresses of data security, hardware maintenance, and overall technology costs.

Identifying the Right Candidates for Cloud Migration

Companies must ensure that each migration candidate is thoroughly analyzed, including technical and business perspectives. This analysis must identify all interdependencies that will be affected by cloud migration because this is a crucial area of risk that is often vulnerable to knowledge gaps. By identifying essential factors and cloud migration goals for each candidate, leaders can improve their migration techniques, plan the migration better, ensure better cloud readiness, and better communicate the benefits of the migration across the organization. This approach can improve cloud adoption and align everyone’s goals in the organization with the overall company objectives.

Rite Software has a deep expertise in identifying the Right Candidates for your cloud transformation journey.