The benefits of moving to a cloud-based platform for communication needs are numerous and well documented—cloud solutions tend to be scalable and customizable, have a high degree of automation, require less maintenance, and provide rich analytics.
Between the present state and future state of your platform is a journey that you and your vendor must embark on together—this journey is important and requires a carefully crafted strategy to realize the benefits of moving to the cloud.
What’s included in your technology stack?
Over time, communication needs evolve, and customers tend to add ad-hoc products and services to satisfy the immediate need-of-the-hour requirements. The result is an amalgamation of infrastructure and data ecosystem tied together with hardware and software, many of which may be at the end-of-life. A typical setup may include:
- Multiple PBX systems
- On-prem contact centers
- Cloud-based security perimeters
- Multiple directory integrations
- Home-grown and cloud-based SSO systems
- Extensive disparate platforms
How to choose the right solutions?
As you continue your migration strategy, determining which solution is right for your business is mission-critical. While there are many different factors that you’ll have to consider (whether going on-prem to cloud or cloud to cloud), these two factors should guide you through the decision-making process:
- Business continuity: End-users should always be able to use communication services while the platform is being migrated.
- Solution compatibility: Cloud solutions should work with your existing investments in network, security, business process, and workflow applications—without requiring extensive additional investments.
Additionally, a robust cloud solution should have the following characteristics:
- No single point of failure
- Provides for a good mean opinion score for voice quality
- Requires minimal additional hardware to deploy
- Has an easy-to-use interface for creating call flows, IVRs, and MACD tasks
- Comes with API-driven built-in integrations for most commonly used productivity and workflow apps
How is RingCentral helping its customers?
At RingCentral, we want the migration process to be as efficient and painless as possible. Recently we helped three enterprise-level customers successfully migrate their UC and CC on-prem services to RingCentral’s cloud-based solution.
For each customer, we created a three-tier migration strategy based on the above guiding principles of business continuity and solution compatibility. Each strategy was focused on careful planning during our pre-build phase, proficient execution in the build-out phase, and a seamless transition during the post-build phase.
Pre-build out: Planning out the migration
This was the phase for discovery and planning. We helped customers take inventory of their assets that they planned to replace and helped identify requirements pertaining to network, security, user personas, directory integrations, required productivity, and workflow applications. We planned the build-out phase keeping the following considerations in mind:
- Maintain phone numbers where possible
- Maintain call flow prompts and option trees
- Maintain features and user experience where possible
- Seamless calling between legacy and RingCentral platforms
- Migrate users in waves
- Coordinate forwards on legacy and RingCentral platforms during each wave to allow extension dialing between migrated and non-migrated users
Build out: Ensuring a smooth transition
The goal of this section was to get the platform ready to accept the first wave of users. Once we migrated the first wave of users, we repeated the steps to bring in the next wave of users. The strategy here was to maintain a dual system where calls would flow via PBX while allowing us to configure the platform according to the requirements, such as:
- Tenant configuration: dial plan, security, and call settings
- Virtual extensions
- Integrations: with directory services, SSO, and E911
- Network readiness testing
- Contact center: call flow auto-attendants, prompts, and call queues
Post-build out: Driving adoption
This phase brought everything together—we worked with the customers to establish change agents that helped drive adoption of the cloud solution. Specific components of this section’s strategy included:
- Completion of ported numbers
- Disabling of old platform
- End user, admin, and HD training
- Enhanced enterprise support
- Updated conferencing solutions
While it is important to choose a cloud vendor that fulfills your requirements, it is equally important to think through the journey that will bring the solution home. At RingCentral, our Professional Services team will help you navigate the waters skillfully to ensure you realize the full potential of your investment in RingCentral’s cloud communications solution.
Learn more about how RingCentral can help your business by contacting us or calling 1-877-807-5364.
Originally published Aug 20, 2020, updated Dec 30, 2022
