More and more businesses are migrating to the cloud as part of a larger digital transformation strategy. Each business is different, but the transition to cloud based operations can be challenging, so you need to get this process right. Your entire communications infrastructure, contact center and all the services you offer are subject to complex changes. Every business has questions before undergoing a change in operations. Is cloud migration really the best move? What about security? How will it impact my business in the short term? To help with some of these concerns, we've pulled together 6 key mistakes to avoid when considering cloud migration.
1. Moving Everything to the Cloud Purely on Principal
This can be a huge mistake. The motivation behind choosing a cloud solution varies from business to business. It may be that you want to upgrade an operating system, update an aging infrastructure or to improve performance and scalability. However, by taking a “move everything to the cloud regardless” approach, you're failing to recognize the intricacies of individual applications. A better solution might be to keep some apps and services on-premises. Adapting a hybrid approach is a smart move, and can make more sense to a business in the short term. You're not driving bulldozer, so don't act like you are.
2. Failing to assess or test your UC environment
Unfortunately, testing is often overlooked, and when it comes to cloud migration, many IT decision makers miss the fact that scalability doesn't eliminate application performance problems. Testing identifies the quality, availability and readiness of your unified communications environment, which is critical for a successful migration. It will help answer important questions like: "How much bandwidth will I need? Will I have enough bandwidth at peak load? Can we scale as the business demands". Testing for usage today and for the future is the best way to ensure that your UC cloud transition goes smoothly, and there is minimum impact on your customers. .
3. Moving too fast
Taking a 'big bang' approach to cloud migration could have a detrimental impact on a business. Your communications systems, contact center and daily operations could end up in chaos. Taking a slow and steady approach; moving team by team, service by service or function by function is a far better approach. A gradual migration to the UC cloud gives your IT department more time to hone their skills and expertise with the cloud platform, and give employees a smoother transition towards familiarity, competency and security.
4. Not proactively monitoring ongoing performance and quality
Monitoring and troubleshooting solutions are a critical part of a cloud migration. It's not uncommon for organizations to run into issues even after extensive testing and a successful deployment. If you're working in a hybrid environment, with multiple vendors, it is critical to receive data from various sources with the ability to stitch it together to monitor and resolve problems, fast. IR's solutions offer proactive monitoring, real time visibility and faster identification and resolution to your cloud migration strategy. Monitoring solutions equip your team with all the tools and information they need to provide a unified view of your entire UC cloud environment, ensuring fast problem resolution and a positive user experience.
5. Not considering security
A cloud service provider will always offer some degree of security, but you can never take the issue of security lightly. A multi-tenant environment like the public cloud means that video, voice and data information from numerous organizations are going through the same channels at once. This could leave you exposed to security risks. You need to be clear about how your provider is managing security and maintaining compliance.
6.Going it alone
Many businesses leave it to their IT teams to come up with their cloud migration architecture. However, if you don’t have the technical skills within your organization to accomplish a complicated migration it’s best to enlist the help of IT partners. Cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and IBM all offer tools and services to help migrate workloads and unified communications applications, but a cloud migration service can alleviate the uncertainty and pain of moving your assets. An IT partner will handle the timescale, budget and services within your migration, while minimizing downtime and disruption to your business.
Any organization considering transitioning to cloud based solutions needs to take careful stock of the pitfalls as well as the benefits to ensure maximum ROI.
