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
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Ian Guest[/caption]
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.”