Migration from on-premise to cloud calling platforms is well underway but hesitancy exists, especially among organisations in more risk averse verticals such as healthcare. The classic concern is that cloud calling and failover capabilities are not sufficiently reliable but many on-premise vendors are seeking to provide a path to cloud by offering maintenance and software contracts with hope of building trust. Even so, key concerns remain regarding resilience and failover capacity, what happens if an internet provider has an outage and whether cloud solutions can really satisfy the business needs.
Variphy believes that greater education is needed to allay these fears. For example, the company says better awareness of how a cloud-calling outage is mitigated is needed and enterprises need to know more about what features are available during an internet outage on the client-side of the network. Variphy itself doesn’t specifically help with failover and resilience, but it does help its customers once they have made the decision to migrate to a cloud calling platform because it provides reporting within a UC environment.
Reporting for Success
Reporting is essential pre, during and post-migration in order to ensure the migration is on track, that expected benefits are being delivered and that users are embracing new features. Variphy can help in the pre-migration phase by determining the existing physical phones’ cloud compatibility and readiness, assessing hunt group configurations, resource staffing and usage statistics.
Customers can use Variphy’s reports to help them determine the right calling plans for each user, given their previous usage, identify trending CUCM, carrier and site capacity utilisation. Usefully, Variphy can find dormant phones, users’ DNs and DIDs and enable customers to view usage on DID, phone models, DNs and on a user basis.
During migration, Variphy is able to export as-built reports for compliance purposes, measure adoption while maintaining visibility of CUCM usage and report on multiple calling platforms at the same time in the same application. Variphy can confirm and document changes in the CUCM and identify who is making or has made a change. This all contributes to helping validate call volume and call flow in the new environment.
Finally, when it comes to post-migration benefits, Variphy can be used on both the new and old systems to automate reports to validate or identify changes in call volume. Variphy retains data of the CUCM configuration and user adoption and licence utilisation. In addition, it enables customers with hybrid UC support.
The decision to migrate to cloud is complex but by gaining the insights Variphy can provide, deployments can be monitored and kept on track. In addition, in the post-deployment phase, Variphy can assist in reporting methods to monitor user adoption on the new cloud platform. It is important to distinguish the users who are utilising the new technology as intended and those who are not, potentially identifying mis-configurations in the platform, or simply reluctance to use the new tooling.
Much of the success of migration to cloud relies on user adoption and proper usage of cloud calling. If this can be measured, it can be understood and outcomes can be assured through gaining accurate insights into where training, for example, might be needed.
