Given what we have experienced during 2020, it might seem surprising that there are still barriers involved in implementing cloud communications solutions. Hasn’t the last year already brought about the remote revolution? Although the answer is undoubtedly a resounding yes, and with it a huge mindset shift in management teams around the world, the technologies that mobilised workforces remain both unevenly distributed and entwined with a wide range of legacy systems.
As Ian Guest, Marketing Director at Pure IP (pictured, above), explained, “Events over the past year have accelerated the move to the cloud with platforms like Microsoft Teams proving their worth. However, while we have seen a huge uptake in Teams with daily active users now over 115 million, a large proportion of that has been usage of internal chat, conferencing and the collaborative features that are arguably easier to just switch on. Organisations are finding that it is a bigger step to migrate their telephony to Teams.”
Businesses might delay their migration to Teams Voice because of the complexity of the project, or resistance to signing off on a new expenditure for a business requirement they had already met with a PBX. It may also relate to how enterprises have traditionally thought about telephony and communications – as a separate realm from IT and digital information.
“There is undoubtedly a different set of complexities to consider when it comes to enterprise telephony and in many organisations, that voice knowledge has been lost over time with the migration of ownership. Consequently, understanding what exists and what is required to provide a latency-free, good quality telephony service, with the routing policies and configurations to support users, can be daunting.” Guest reflected.
“As a multinational organisation, you might have dozens of different platforms, connections, regulatory considerations, and user requirements built up over years through mergers, acquisitions, or employee attrition. As a result, no single department will be able to accurately model all the user profiles, describe how call routings are managed, understand the regional nuances of PSTN replacement services, or be familiar with how everything is configured.”
So how do businesses break through this final frontier and gain the full benefits of moving telephony into the cloud, while ensuring communications are not disrupted, and the end solution is effective and meets the requirements of both the business and user?
“The drive to move to the cloud is undeniable as more businesses seek to capitalise on the flexibilities and associated management and cost benefits. It makes sense, so our role as a vendor is to find ways to assist in the journey and remove the obstacles.” outlines Guest.
“At Pure IP, for example, we create a tailored cloud enablement plan for every customer which starts with a detailed discovery phase that thoroughly audits their existing PBX and telephony environment. This consolidates all the information about their pre-existing systems, maps out their user profiles, and automates some of the research into their settings into an easily digestible report”
“This provides a foundation upon which we can develop an appropriate migration plan with the client”, he continued, “which can be deployed in phases or as part of a fully integrated technical rollout. We can get involved as much or as little as necessary with the migration, often determined by the capabilities and resources available within the customer.”
“All of our cloud enablement services have been designed with two goals in mind: to simplify and accelerate migrating to cloud communications solutions like Microsoft Teams using Direct Routing.”
“The technology is mature and ready to provide businesses with increased resilience and flexibility, and the reality of the way we work today means this transition to fully cloud-based telephony will take place. This will inevitably also require a degree of integration or interoperability with other cloud-based business applications, but we firmly believe it is in our customer’s best interest to make the move to the cloud, and we are ready to manage and guide the process, however complex, so more and more organisations can, at last, become fully cloud-enabled.”
