As a small, medium business owner, getting stuck with technology constraints should be your least concern. But, with the world moving to the Cloud, are you taking the right steps to take your businesses to the next level and break away from the shackles of technology restrictions? Let’s take a look at how you can move your small to medium business to the Cloud!
Carey quietly sat on the edge of a weathered bench on the pier near the Sydney harbor. Deep in her thoughts, her unique ideas were jostling for her attention. With her dreamy but determined eyes set on the horizon, she looked at a patch of clouds slowly moving away. Carey, a budding entrepreneur, thought about how moving to the Cloud can give her business the impetus she has been searching for. The intuit study predicts that around 80% of small businesses would be in the Cloud by 2020, up from only 37% in 2014. The study says the Cloud is the future for small businesses.
While there are many advantages for a business to move their hosting needs to a cloud provider, the following are the key things you can look for if you are starting to understand the nuances of hosting and setting up in the Cloud.
You might have a static website you want to host in AWS; you can always start at the free tier. Yes, Amazon Web Services has a free tier in which you can get to experiment with most services for the first 12 months. After that, you have to have an account, create one at AWS.
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Getting a Domain Name
You might already have a domain name, and if not, you can get one at GoDaddy. In addition, you can get domain names at different registrars. Shop around and see which one suits your needs. You can get one for as low as $2 to $5 a month.
Hosted Zone on Route 53
All the DNS requests get handled here. Log on to Route53 and follow the steps as per this guide. You create a Hosted Zone here, and in the Name Servers, you can provide the domain name registrar you bought earlier. You will create the same number of A records as the number of S3 buckets you have. Follow this guide for more details on setting up a hosted zone.
S3 Buckets
S3 bucket is the storage for your files. To upload the photos, videos, or documents to Amazon S3, you need to set up the S3 buckets. First, create two buckets; one would redirect to the other. They would be like the following: 1) xyz.com and 2) www.xyz.com. The first is the main bucket to upload content, and the second will redirect to the first. For details on how to create an S3 bucket, look at this. Then go about creating and configuring the bucket and upload the data.
Choose an SSL Certificate
Amazon has a service of issuing an SSL to you for a reasonable price. SSL is essential to keep your data secure while transferring data between a user and a website. It bodes well for your business, too, as search engines tend to better rank those sites, which have an SSL Certificate. Follow this to set up a certificate.
Cloudfront with SSL
Amazon Cloudfront is a content delivery network service ( CDN ). Cloudfront ensures that your website is available from the various edge locations of the internet. It has hundreds of points of presence (PoPs), making your content accessible across the world. First, you will have to set up a cloud front distribution. Then, post setting up the cloud front, you will have to update the record sets for your domain. After setting up, you can get your domain name from CloudFront. Once done, return to Route 53, hosted zone, and change the alias name to the CloudFront Domain Name.
This is just a small example detailing how you can host your secure static site at AWS.
Wrapping up
While deciding to move to Cloud, it’s essential to consider how you will treat your application. Multiple strategies dictate this. If you are re-hosting, you are making the least complicated move, but since you are not changing anything fundamentally, the move may not be scalable. You need to look at the application code. Re platform means you will change at least one underlying platform; it could change the database or the web server technology. Re factor would suggest that you are going to make considerable changes to the architecture and services. Since you end up redesigning your application, there are opportunities to modernize the app and make it more efficient.
The other aspect to consider is storage. Even though cloud storage is cheaper these days, it makes sense to see the different tiers of storage available, and you can pick and choose which type of data would reside in what kind of storage. In the case of S3 at amazon, one can select a storage class. Finally, do a test run, copy the application, ensure that the encryptions are in place. Databases are functional and accessible, and data migration is successful, and so on.
While Carey moves away from the pier and sets up her test run to move to the Cloud, you can review the following Deloitte report J . As per Deloitte, 80% of the SMBs they spoke with believed that Cloud would enable them to scale grow faster. Therefore, it is essential to stay abreast of technology and be agile in our approach. The world is changing how business is being done; it’s paramount that one keeps pace with the change and adapt.
You may also want to read 8 Ways to reduce your Cloud spend to help you plan your Cloud journey.
