I am witnessing more and more, a domino effect of customers and other enterprises taking the jump from in-house data centre-based management for contact centres and UC systems and moving them into cloud-based services. The value proposition for most businesses do stack up; you get a highly fault tolerant service, you get very flexible commercial options, enhancements and upgrades are done with virtually no impact to your business, and you expand and contract your service needs with ease.
But it isn’t for everybody or for every type of business. I have heard of some horror stories of instances when businesses have attempted to migrate to cloud-based services for contact centres and when replacing their PBX – resulting in hampered revenue or the curtailing of several value-added CX services that customers are used to and expect.
Here are some scenarios you could find yourself going out on a limb for when it comes to your cloud services
Scenario 1 – Cloud design assurance
The solutions of today are very much “out of the box” with some additional enhancements and/or configuration required. And that’s great. But what happens when things change, either by our own teams or by the actual cloud providers themselves? Where is this record of change activity being written? How can you be certain that the changes made were all approved and have not had a negative effect on your system’s service?
Scenario 2 – Intellectual Property
How you configure your design of service is completely up to you. The time and effort it has taken to migrate your business model into cloud services should be protected in case of theft or copying by the cloud provider. What are your protections, both technically and contractually to protect them? More to the point, what happens when you choose to migrate away from your current cloud service to another one? Can you easily extract the detailed configuration of literally hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours of work safely and easily? Is your cloud provider even equipped to support such a request?
Scenario 3 – Fear of being locked in
Following on from scenario two is the potential cost and risk of moving from one cloud provider to another. The market is constantly changing with new providers, features, services and price points coming online all the time. What happens if your current provider fails to deliver on their promises? What if they raise your costs? If you are not able to independently extract your cloud design for your voice traffic or your contact centre and keep a running accurate record of your design, how will you be able to take advantage of new offerings and remain competitive?
Scenario 4 – Managing a hybrid of Cloud and on-premise
Most businesses are risk-averse, and the larger enterprises even more so. To that end, they will likely have a portion of their services running in on-premise hardware and the rest in the cloud. This could be very tricky to manage, especially when it comes to design consistency. How can you be certain that your configuration in the cloud matches what you have in your premise-based systems? How do you keep them in sync? What happens if something fails in either/or? What is your fallback plan?
The Independent Auditing Record
We have been in the configuration management space for over ten years and the great thing is our capabilities work in both cloud and on-premise based solutions. So, when thinking about the above scenarios, by having a live, up-to-the-second, a record of your configuration, and “who did what” on your system can address these:
● Be alerted when sensitive changes occur, giving you the opportunity to correct it or investigate
● Have an instant record of your design that can be transported and translated between different cloud providers
● Take your IP with you to another cloud service. Seek out the most competitive offer in the market, knowing you can take your valuable configuration business knowledge with you.
● Ensure accuracy of design that can span not only your cloud and on-premise systems but also your labs, testing systems and production systems all at once
● Guarantee security and compliance with detailed change activity reports
By having solutions like ours that are platform agnostic and work to ensure you own your data rather than anyone else, will guarantee greater protection your company. You can rest more easily knowing that your company’s designs, business knowledge and activity is recorded and tracked for you to access at any time.