According to a 2018 Spiceworks survey, 98 percent of enterprises still use on-premises servers. The survey, which featured over 1000 IT professionals in North America and Europe hints at something big in the move toward migration. We’ve still got some evangelizing to do. There are countless cloud champions within organizations of all sizes, fighting to help bring their enterprises into the digital age.
One could then conclude there’s a correlation between the low number of enterprise leaders who have yet to migrate to the cloud and the perceived complexity surrounding the act.
Some Perspective on Cloud Migration
Flowroutes’s Senior Director of Product Management Sascha Mehlhase says the migration process of moving enterprise communications services to the cloud isn’t complex. He argues, there is a ‘perceived complexity.’ And I, for one, agree. Mehlhase says the perceived difficulty surrounding migrating voice and messaging services to the cloud is halting many businesses’ automation efforts.
“As enterprises move from cloud-first strategies to cloud-only, enterprises still hesitate to take a pivotal leap into the pool of cloud telephony”
Mehlhase shed some light on migration and the advantages of making the switch. “If an enterprise leader spends millions of dollars for on-premies solutions and finds out they could have done it faster, cheaper, and without all the overhead. At this point, they have to ask themselves, what am I paying staff for?” he added. He also told me, he accredits a lack of cloud adaption to a fear of poor audio quality, or rather the perceived notion that VoIP calls are not as steady as fixed-lines.
Today, that could not be further from the truth, as Colin Gill, Product Manager at Akixi told me a few months ago. “A major reason why enterprises receive poor CX feedback could be because they refuse to modernize, Gill shared. Be it change in the form of new Cloud-based UC systems, a lack of understanding of the technology, or they think internet telephony is unstable – some still manage to dismiss omnichannel. The reality is, the internet is more stable than we give it credit for and is more powerful than most traditional phone lines.”
The Future of Cloud Migration
There is a lot of room left for growth in the cloud space, and a growing number of enterprises are adapting, migrating on-premises communications to cloud-only solutions invented for agility and reduced costs. Although this number is low, there are some shining examples of early adaptors, and those companies will continue to thrive thanks to solid communications which remain the center of a well-oiled enterprise.
I also had the chance to chat with Denise Mauldin, the Lead Engineer at Flowroute. Both Mehlhase and Maudlin provided me with a breadth of information. But something Mauldin told me on our call resonated. She said there are tons of tools available for enterprise leaders to migrate their communications to the cloud. According to her, cloud providers want to make it easy for developers and IT professionals who might don’t have the technical experience to handle migrating to the cloud migration, which is why they provide a ton of resources.
Enterprise IT and developers can take advantage of extended support, access advanced deployment teams, white papers, and educational courses catered toward bringing these professionals up to speed.
