Develop a Winning Transition Strategy to Enterprise Cloud Calling: Part 4, The Migration Process

The How to Develop a Winning Transition Strategy for Enterprise Cloud Calling blog series offers a four-part guided tour on how to take your business to a cloud calling and collaboration future that delivers all the benefits you expect from a quality cloud service.

Part 4, The migration process

This is the fourth and final part of this blog series on building and executing a successful strategy for migrating enterprise unified communications (UC) and collaboration to the cloud. We covered the reasons to start the cloud journey in the previous posts. Now it’s time to discuss the execution strategy.

A few years ago, I was driving across West Texas and I could see smoke on the not-too-distant horizon. As I got closer, a grass fire came into view and the wind was blowing smoke right across the highway. I did what you should not do…. followed other cars into the smoke thinking, it’s not too bad. Well as I entered the smoke, my visibility diminished and all I could see was the line on the side of the road. Instantly I thought, I’m in trouble, why did I do this and how do I get out of this mess. My outcome was uncertain to say the least.

The thought of transitioning your calling platform to the cloud might seem a lot like my experience of driving through a west Texas grassfire. You might ask yourself, “How confident am I in our ability to actually transfer our on-premises UC system data to the cloud?” Moving your phone numbers to the cloud is straight forward, but what about everything else that makes up your phone system – incoming call flows, outbound dial plans, group calling/ring configurations, executive/assistant arrangements, multiline call appearances and business critical application integrations. Configurations to support critical business workflows develop and evolve over time, to keep up with your changing business needs. How do you take all that to the cloud? If you are an IT leader, this is a question that burns, forgive the pun, in your mind as you consider the transition.

The same, but different 

While there are many cloud vendors to choose from, businesses starting with Cisco Unified Communications Manager on-premises as the collaboration foundation, have a direct path to the cloud, based on a calling architecture that will preserve the features and user experience for desktop, mobile, room and telephone devices, minimizing disruptions to your business. With Dedicated Instance for Webex Calling, the day after you transition your system to the cloud, employees will know how to use their endpoints without any additional training. They will just have greater mobile flexibility, with access to new and future innovation from the cloud. You complete your cloud transition without disruption, making the journey better for everyone.

To ease your transition, with a Cisco solution, you can trunk the on-premises UCM (Unified Communications Manager) or another PBX to your Dedicated Instance for Webex Calling to share critical resources during the migration.

Simplify your cloud transition

To make your transition from Cisco on-premises calling to Webex Calling even more seamless, Cisco channel partners can offer customers migration and implementation service support through the Webex Setup Assist program. Using Webex Setup Assist reduces the time and complexity of migration planning. Setup Assist includes a process to extract configuration data, such as call routing, user data, device configuration, voicemail/unified messaging, among other content from your previous system, to ensure a high quality, smooth transition of your telephony services to the cloud.

Single pane of glass administration

To help customers manage their transition to the cloud,  Control Hub provides a holistic administrative portal to manage Cisco collaboration workloads like calling, meetings, messaging, and contact center. Control Hub provides IT administrators visibility into their on-premises Cisco Unified Communications Manager, as well as Webex Calling environments, making migration progress easy to track. In addition to general administration, Control Hub provides detailed analytics and reporting metrics, giving system administrators critical system information before, during and after Webex Calling migrations.

Take the next step 

If you are ready to begin to transition calling, or everything collaboration to the cloud, your trusted Cisco partner will help you get there on your timeline, with exceptional quality and proven performance. If cloud collaboration is not in your immediate future, Cisco has the best on-premises UC solution to give your business a fresh look, while simultaneously preparing you for a future cloud transition when you are ready to make the change.

The journey to the collaboration cloud should be exciting, for all the right reasons. Not like my drive through the smoke of the West Texas grass fire. With Webex cloud solutions you will have clear visibility into your final destination, teamed up with Cisco and Cisco partner experts who will help you navigate your successful transition to the cloud. Reach out to your Cisco partner today, to learn more.

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Read all the blogs in the series

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