Moving Your Business to the Cloud Without Losing Your Files (or Your Mind)
Dear diary. Today we moved the office to the cloud. By 10am Njoroge had uploaded the entire shared drive, including a folder called "Old Stuff Do Not Delete" which turned out to contain his wedding photos. By noon, accounts could not find last month's invoices. By 3pm, someone suggested we go back to flash disks. By 5pm, I was on my third cup of chai and seriously considering a career in poultry farming. Our grand cloud migration, Kenya's least glamorous office drama, was off to a flying start.
It does not have to go like this. A cloud migration in Kenya, or anywhere, is mostly a logistics exercise, and like any good move, the secret is packing properly before the lorry arrives.
Step one: know what you actually have
Before you move a single file, make an honest list of where your information lives today. In most Kenyan offices it is scattered across:
The shared drive on that one computer everyone calls the server
Individual laptops, especially the Desktop folder, which is basically a junk drawer
Email attachments going back to the Moi era
WhatsApp groups, where the real decisions are made
Flash disks in drawers, handbags and one in Achieng\'s car
You will not move all of it, and you should not. But you need to know it exists, otherwise the one contract you need next month will be sitting on a flash disk in a car in Kitengela.
Step two: clear out before you carry
Nobody packs the broken thermos when they move house. Go through your folders and sort them into three piles: keep and move, archive, and delete. Duplicates, ancient drafts and fourteen copies of the same logo can go. If your business has legal or tax reasons to keep certain records, archive those rather than deleting them.
This is also the moment to agree on a simple folder structure. Something like Clients, Finance, HR, Operations and Templates works for most small businesses. Fancy structures with eleven levels of subfolders look clever for a week and then everyone gives up and saves to the top level.
Step three: run your cloud migration in waves
The worst migration plan is "everybody upload everything on Monday". Instead, move one team or one type of document at a time:
Start with a small, willing team, ideally people who will complain constructively
Move their files, let them work for a week, and fix what breaks
Then move the next team, using what you learnt
Leave finance and HR until you are confident, because they will be the loudest if anything goes missing
Keep the old drive running, read only, for a few weeks after each wave. That way, when someone says "but my file was there", you can check rather than argue.
Step four: sort out permissions early
In the old system, everyone could see everything, because the shared drive was one big room with no doors. The cloud lets you put doors in, so use them. Salaries should not be visible to the intern. Client contracts should not be editable by everyone with a login. Decide who owns each main folder and who can view or edit it before you upload, not after the intern has already seen the payroll.
Step five: train people, briefly and kindly
A one hour session is enough for most teams. Cover how to find files, how to share a link instead of attaching a copy, and how to recover something deleted by mistake. Then appoint a friendly go-to person for questions. Every office already has one: the colleague who knows the Wi-Fi password. Promote them.
When to call in help
If you have custom software, a database, or systems that talk to each other, a file move is only part of the job. That is where a proper plan matters, and where an experienced software and cloud migration team can map out the steps so nothing important drops between the old system and the new one.
Dear diary, one month later. Everyone can find their files. Njoroge's wedding photos are in his personal account where they belong. And nobody has said the word "flash disk" in weeks. The poultry farm can wait.
If your own move involves more than a shared drive, talk to Philsoft before the lorry arrives. Otherwise, start this week with step one: make the list. It is the least glamorous step and the one that saves the most tears.