The benefits of moving to cloud-based phone services, for better management of costs, administration, and greater flexibility, need little elaboration. As Ian Guest, Marketing Director at Pure IP, explained it, “If you are following a cloud-first strategy, you want to migrate as many of your services into the cloud as possible, to realise the benefits and avoid having to support systems locally.”
However, organisations with legacy PBXs, multiple locations, and/or specialist software needs, are faced with challenges migrating their full estate, and all of their users to the cloud. “The larger the organisation, the more complex it becomes,” Guest continued. “If you have a multi-national footprint for example, with users spread around the globe, considerations need to be given to service provision in each region, as well as variations in compliance regulations and data security.”
Integrations can prove to be another hurdle, as contact centre, call recording, or other voice application requirements, may not be present on your platform of choice. Microsoft Teams, for example may have 75 million daily users, but it doesn’t offer a native contact centre.
“Most enterprises will end up requiring a mix of applications from different vendors, so they have to consider how to stitch them together cost-effectively, while still being able to move users into the cloud.”
Plotting your route to Cloud Services
As an example, let’s look at the possible requirements for a global consumer-facing business with a presence in multiple countries. There is likely to be a headquarters, regional offices and smaller satellite operations in the form of stores or similar outlets. There is also likely to be a mix of office and warehouse workers, a contact centre, and requirements for call recording. How do you migrate all those users to the cloud with such a mixed environment?
“Start by identifying the requirements and then the appropriate technology,” says Guest. “From our perspective, there are a few distinct categories of user requirements in this example that can be satisfied with a blend of applications and services that complement each other, without the need for additional on-premises hardware.”
“The headquarters and regional offices will likely need a fully-featured communications and collaboration platform such as Teams, but their stores will only require basic telephony services. As such, while HQ would be migrated to Teams Direct Routing, the stores could forego the cost of extra Teams licences, and make use of WebRTC, or Pure IP’s hosted cloud-based telephony platform, which uses the same global voice network as our Teams Direct Routing solution. Similarly, Pure IP’s network can be used as a bridge between Teams and the contact centre, which all together, allows users at head office, the contact centre, and storefronts to be in the cloud, using the same network and service provider.”
Planning the migration journey
With communications as a business-critical service, successful planning of the transition is important in ensuring the migration takes place with no downtime and minimal disruption – regardless of the complexity.
Having selected the component parts, it is equally as important to plot the journey you need to take to bring them to life.
“Understanding the process of migrating to the cloud and what it involves can be just as complex as designing the solution”
“Most migration projects are phased in some way to make them more manageable and even tasks such as porting users from one system to another can be complex and time-consuming, especially when you are talking about thousands of users.”
“Our philosophy at Pure IP is built on openness. Our global voice network is delivered as a managed service and designed to be able to integrate with a myriad of platforms and applications to provide a personalised solution for the inevitable mixed environment our customers face.” Guest continues, “As well as our secure and resilient voice network, we can also combine hosted and WebRTC offerings that can be bought together seamlessly, wrapped in a managed service to enable our customer optimise the move to the cloud.”
So while the goal of 100% cloud adoption remains the end-game, the path there may be complex — and best navigated with specialised support along the way.
