Cloud Migration Guide for Ottawa SMBs: What You Need to Know Before You Move

"Just move everything to the cloud" sounds simple. In practice, a poorly planned cloud migration can leave you with higher monthly costs, slower performance, and compliance headaches.

Here's what Ottawa businesses need to know before migrating.

Step 1: Audit What You Have Before moving anything, catalogue every application, server, and data store. Classify workloads as: cloud-ready, needs refactoring, or should stay on-premise. Not everything belongs in the cloud — some workloads are cheaper and faster on-premise.

Step 2: Choose the Right Cloud Model

• - Public Cloud (Azure, AWS, GCP) — Best for scalability and global reach. Higher operational cost but zero capital expense.
• - Private Cloud (Proxmox, OpenStack) — Best for sensitive data, compliance-heavy industries, and predictable workloads.
• - Hybrid Cloud — Most Ottawa businesses end up here. Critical data on-premise or private cloud, scalable workloads on public cloud.

Step 3: Plan for Microsoft 365 First If you're still running on-premise Exchange, the easiest and highest-ROI first migration is to Microsoft 365. Email, Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive — all cloud-hosted with 99.9% uptime SLA.

Step 4: Compliance Comes Before Migration If your business handles personal health information (PHI), legal documents, or federal government data, your cloud provider must be PIPEDA-compliant and ideally Canadian-hosted. Not all clouds are equal.

Step 5: Plan Your Cutover Carefully The migration window is when things go wrong. SecRealm uses a staged migration approach — we run cloud and on-premise in parallel until the cloud environment is fully validated, then cut over during a low-traffic window.

Common Mistakes to Avoid - Migrating without a rollback plan - Underestimating egress costs - Not training staff on new cloud tools - Forgetting to update firewall and DNS rules post-migration

SecRealm has completed over 50 cloud migrations for Ottawa businesses. Book a free cloud readiness assessment to find out where you stand.