Inherited or Bought a Small Business? Here’s How to Modernize It for the Future

The last of the US Baby Boomers will be at retirement age within the next seven to 10 years and the days of them passing down the family business to their children may not be as common as it once was. This could create both challenges and opportunities for older small or medium business (SMB) owners ready for a more leisurely lifestyle. It increases the need to prepare their companies for younger, tech-savvy future owners at the best possible valuation.

Similarly, prospective SMB company buyers or inheritors should thoroughly review the systems currently in place and how to best modernize them for the future. Why? A business’s digital footprint can increase revenue, drive efficiencies with cloud computing, and realign their strategies for the next generation of customers. Among the first tasks to take on:

• Strategies to update legacy processes
• Organizing and monetizing years (or decades) of disorganized data
• Identifying costly, redundant, and inefficient areas of the business

The process to streamline and modernize future operations is often a tedious and time consuming task but not insurmountable. Below is a step-by-step guide to help make this a successful inheritance or purchase and clearly define the processes to create a modern digital SMB company for the future. Read on for specific Amazon Web Services resources to help you.

1. Identify and document your SMB’s technology

If the SMB you bought was founded decades ago, it may have a patchwork of systems and files saved across various devices. The first step is to identify, categorize, and document your current technology environment. Think of how best to answer the “who,” “what,” “when,” and “where,” behind everything. The inter-dependencies will become clear as you dive deep into a technology audit. Start with these sample questions:

• Who in the company owns each specific device?
• What recurring or one-time IT services did the previous owner pay for?
• When was the last time important company data was backed up and where was it stored?
• Where are all of the laptops, desktops, mobile devices, and on-premises servers? How are all of them connected (if at all?)

For applications in an office, data center, or another cloud, you can understand the current technical and financial environment with the AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA). An OLA is a free process to identify the current technology used in the business by taking a snapshot of the applications and licenses. This is followed by a comprehensive report with recommendations including price estimates and stategies to optimize licensing costs.

The next step is to categorize applications and technology into logical buckets from both a technical and financial lens. What items are critical? What technology is tied directly to revenue? What can be retired for a more modern solution? This step will help shape the future state and business vision over the first six months, year, and beyond.

The last step is to document the current environment. Along with the OLA, you’ll want to document the current technology environment. Doing this process now will make any further migration to the cloud more specific and secure. Consider answering these questions:

• Who has admin access?
• What happens if one of the on-premises servers stops working?
• Which teams use each application?

2. Begin—or continue—migrating to the cloud

Depending on the age or function of your SMB, it may or may or not already use the cloud for some of its business functions. If your company is still using on-premises servers or using less modern storage solutions, migrating could be the right move. So, why migrate to cloud? Migrating to the cloud allows you to better manage IT costs, enhance data security, and grow with the power of proven AWS solutions. According to this study, organizations who migrated to AWS from on-premises saw, on average:

• Up to 66 percent infrastructure cost savings
• Up to 77 percent reduction in software licenses required
• 43 percent lower time to market for new features
• Up to 29 percent increase in staff focus on innovation
• 45 percent fewer security-related incidents

Once you’ve identified resources and applications for the migration, AWS can help you assess real-time utilization and performance data to build a business case for migration. This assessment will help determine the current state and decide whether a lift-and-shift migration (moving the entire application into the cloud as is) or selective migration (only moving a portion the application or making changes before moving to the cloud) makes the best sense.

If you’re like most SMBs, you may not have in-house IT help readily available. Our global group of AWS Partner Network consultants have the capabilities to rapidly migrate in accordance to best practices. These AWS Certified partners can handle the assessment and mobilize phases. If eligible, you can also use funding programs to accelerate the migration.

If you do have IT staff, they can use AWS services to migrate databases, plan, and execute the transfer of your existing data to the cloud. For instance, AWS Snowball enables them to easily migrate large amounts of data to the cloud without limits in storage capacity or compute power.

3. Setup data governance procedures for long-term success

All SMBs should have a comprehensive legal and security governance strategy for their data. A strong governance strategy is important because it’s designed to manage security events, reduce legal issues, and control runaway costs. Cloud governance also reduces risk by standardizing operations across both technical and non-technical teams. Technical tools like AWS Control Tower can enforce best practices, standards, and regulatory requirements with preconfigured controls, while financial tools like AWS Budgets keep track of cloud expenses.

Every company is different. AWS and its Partners can provide governance solutions for cloud financial management, regulation & compliance, and observability. Here are a few equipped to work with SMBs:

• nOps provides real-time cost saving recommendations from a single dashboard
• Drata offers automated compliance controls for healthcare, financial, and other regulatory-heavy industries
• New Relic observes the security of your cloud environment and can help with governance goals for legal reviews and audits

Read How to Create a Data Governance Strategy for Your Small or Medium Business for more strategies on how you and your teams can create a governance strategy.

4. Modernize custom legacy applications

Many SMBs—specifically in manufacturing or retail—use custom business apps that track supply chain and inventory management issues. Those apps are the backbone of a company’s operations and can be modernized in the cloud. With AWS, you can use managed services to offload time consuming, tedious tasks to focus on innovation. Depending on your needs, we may recommend serverless architecture (AWS-hosted) to reduce cost for small interactions rather than running large, on-premises servers nonstop.

You can also enhance your end users’ experience with generative AI to speed customer interactions, increase employee productivity, and gain deeper insights from your data. For example, with a modern app, it could be possible for one of your employees to pose queries in natural language and get answers—all without technical expertise.

Another key critical step is to setup regular reviews to optimize your AWS resources based on changing requirements and advancements in AWS services.

Conclusion

Cloud adoption builds a better future of SMBs that will empower them to modernize and grow. Start with a detailed assessment of what you own, then define the future vision for growth, and execute the vision with an AWS Cloud migration plan. Once the applications are stable you can further modernize and monetize these business by leveraging app modernization and AI. With the right set of tools and infrastructure provided by AWS, you can realize cost savings, enhance security, and achieve operational efficiency.

If you are excited to bring value from your newly acquired business, you can contact us so we can help you determine your migration priorities.