Latin America. Today, converged infrastructure, cloud technology, and hybrid IT platforms require contextual assessment and analysis. When choosing between these options, companies should have a strategy or guide to integrate the cloud as an option. The plan would serve to take the right steps for discovery, design and migration, ensuring the best implementation and results. In this regard, it is important to highlight the key factors of strategy, discovery, design and migration.
The strategy: the first step is the most important
Today's converged infrastructures and cloud technology platforms require a robust, automated, and standardized infrastructure. Customers considering communications and data migration projects need to understand critical success factors and potential transformation pain points. With thorough planning, architecture, tool selection, and execution, organizations of all sizes can mitigate potential risks and the resulting business impacts.
Whether a company has already made the decision to migrate its infrastructure, communications, and applications to the cloud or is considering the possibility, an effective strategy is essential to success. For those organizations considering the decision to adopt cloud services, a trusted advisor can help define strategic goals and existing operating models, and then provide education on the various ways cloud technology could improve business operations and financial stability. Those organizations that have already decided they will reap the benefits of cloud services should still select the engagement and migration strategy that best suits their unique business and technical requirements. These companies must identify which transformations would benefit them the most in order to develop appropriate business plans to implement the necessary changes.
Discovery: Charting the Path to Change
As with any major IT project, the key to a successful migration is to identify an accurate profile of the environment. It is imperative to know exactly where critical business services are located, what technologies are involved, and what infrastructures support them. A thorough assessment of the current infrastructure should include complete hardware, validation, and application inventory dependencies.
When assessing the environment as a whole, as well as the objective, a project management plan should be designed to articulate the resources needed to execute the migration, along with estimated timelines and budget projections. These conversations will bring to light the internal processes and interdisciplinary collaboration needed to implement a successful cloud migration.
Design: clear objectives for the future
The discovery phase establishes a high-level design that serves as a schema for application migration. Based on this, cloud migration specialists will formulate a detailed migration design that provides the steps for the process of deployment, transition, capacity, communication, and disaster recovery, along with test and acceptance plans Each of these plans will take into account the physical characteristics of the site location, server technology and the organizational structure of the business.
Since every company has unique business goals and technical requirements to meet those goals, it's essential to select a migration tool with cross-platform capabilities and scalability. A unified solution can deliver seamless native support for all operating systems and storage providers. Such solutions can preserve the integrity of the host by replicating changes to the new location.
Migration: Ensuring system compatibility
With an increasingly fast-paced business environment, customers demand that businesses remain active and up and running at all times. When businesses are expected to operate 24/7, a five-minute system outage could be catastrophic, regardless of industry. Keeping all critical systems in sync is key to avoiding business disruption during any migration. A properly designed solution will ensure that all applications and data are continuously recoverable throughout the cloud migration process. Whether a company is moving data to a new server, consolidating files, or migrating its communications, the plan should be specifically designed to address those goals.
Migration includes building and testing the solution before deployment. Once released to production, the migration service provider will conduct a verification checklist to validate the effectiveness of the solution and manage the necessary changes. After completing the assessment, ensuring system compatibility, and preparing the migration service, the service provider will authorize the deployment.
Once companies migrate to UCaaS, they will be amazed at the services that will now be available to their users, such as:
- Cloud PBX: Offers all the capabilities of an on-premises PBX without maintenance and installation costs, and features voice and video in can resolution.
- Unified Communications: Users can call, message, or meet from their desktop, mobile, or tablet phone, from anywhere.
- Messaging: Employees can organize and share workspace information, track programs, archive documents, and collaborate in real time.
- Virtual meetings: Everyone gets a virtual meeting space, which they can use from their desktop, mobile device, or even in a conference room.
- Contact Center: Uses cloud communication to help the call center achieve higher revenue goals by leveraging advanced analytics and machine learning.
Undoubtedly, a successful cloud migration requires a lot of effort, meticulous planning, and rigorous implementation processes. However, with detailed standardization in the exercise, a seamless migration to the cloud can be trusted.
Text written by David Rosenthal, UC Evangelist for BroadSoft
