Cloud Telephony Migration

Key Considerations for a Smooth Transition

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Cloud-hosted telephony is currently at the cutting edge of enterprise communications - with benefits that include reductions in on-premise infrastructure and its cost-of-ownership, dynamic scaling of service, carbon footprint reductions, along with the usability of offering all your communications services through a single application.

However, migrating an existing telephony solution to a cloud hosted platform will likely require a lot of consideration, planning, and preparation. This white paper makes use of some of our previous experience in working with cloud telephony, to provide you with some key pointers at the start of your migration journey.

Firstly, an SME (Small and Medium-sized Enterprise) is likely to have an easier time when migrating to a cloud telephony platform than a large multinational enterprise. Scale and variation across the organisation greatly contribute to the complexity and difficulty when planning and delivering the move.

When considering such a migration, it is beneficial to consider the following issues.

1. Infrastructure

  • Architecture: As soon as possible, draft and receive approval for the HLD (High Level Design) showing how the Cloud Telephony service will reach all on-premise and off-premise users, interwork with any existing telephony system kept during the transition, and integrate with external systems (e.g., accounting or recording surveillance), while satisfying security requirements.
  • Capacity: Consider both network capacity and any compute capacity (e.g., if VDI is used).
  • Security: Gain early approval from your technical security managers and information security managers. Ensure that the cloud service provider meets all security / service risk requirements and standards (e.g., ISO-270xx).

2. Location

Multinational organisations will need to abide by telephony regulations that vary between countries. Some countries will not permit cloud hosting of telephony services or data either inside or outside of their borders. Some countries, such as India, mandate VoIP solutions to prevent toll bypass scenarios (which many cloud telephony solutions address) or have a requirement to register users as part of a ‘Know Your Customer’ requirement.

In many countries, the financial industry will include additionally stringent hosting requirements, allow calls but prevent cross communications of material non-public information between retail and private banking departments, and mandate recording of all media types – including voice, voicemail, SMS, and – while requiring such recorded calls to be dropped if the recording capability goes offline.

3. Commercial

Financial justification will require a business case, which may explore:

  • How long will the existing on-premise system be required to continue, and can the organisation financially support two telephony systems for the duration when migrating users from one system to the other?
  • Whether any savings in the licensing and service cost and tariff model will mitigate the overall delivery cost, mitigate the cost of supporting both systems during the migration period - and when is the return on investment?
  • The Procurement / Vendor Management team will also need to be engaged early to advise on vendor selection and the business case.

4. Process

  • User Management and Onboarding: Processes relating to movement, addition, change, and deletion of users (i.e., initial migration of users and ongoing management of joiners/movers/leavers) will require updates including:
    • The operations support model;
    • Automation, if required
  • Maintenance and Troubleshooting: The operations support model will need to be updated to cover the shift of responsibilities, processes, and SLAs from the as-is system to the new cloud telephony system.

5. People & Organisation

  • How will the cloud telephony system and its features be offered to your organisation? Will it be via a portal?
  • Will the new service meet or exceed the telephony service requirements that support the way-of-working for the business? For example, can users retain their existing phone numbers, or will they have to migrate to new numbers without losing customers?
  • How will you manage the service introduction? Is training required, either for support/admin teams or the users themselves?
  • How will you capture the requirements, success criteria, and user journeys from the business?
  • How will you gain the buy-in and feedback from the business at an early stage?
  • How will you categorise user types and efficiently apply telephony policy, so that local and global enterprise policies are met?
  • The dial plan must reflect the shortcodes and number translation patterns currently in use across the organisation.
  • How will the departmental costs be handled?

All these points listed in this paper are areas that Net Reply has anticipated and dealt with when supporting other organisations moving to cloud telephony. We hope that these points help you to uncover a number of considerations and obstacles that can be addressed early in your endeavour to move to these cutting-edge communications services offered on the cloud.
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    Net Reply is the Reply Group company specialising in network consultancy and system integration. With an agile and collaborative approach, we partner with our clients to ensure their network ecosystem is ready to exploit the opportunities of Digitalisation, IOT and Cloud by harnessing the power of Automation and Future Networking. Founded in 2010, Net Reply is a focused, dedicated, agile group of talented and experienced technologists and consultants.