Clarifying the Cloud Decision

Clouds have always held a special fascination for mankind. They’ve acted as vehicles of imagination, encouraging us to wonder what we see hidden in their ever-evolving shapes. For many, clouds hold an association with the divine while for others, they are strictly a practical phenomenon – will I need an umbrella?

So it’s no surprise that this same fascination now extends to the IT version of clouds. In the past few years, you could hardly open a tech magazine or visit a site without seeing some article telling you that the world is moving to the cloud, and you either need to get there or be left hopelessly behind.

As with most things, though, it’s not quite that black and white. Whether a move to the cloud makes sense or not depends on several factors. Following are some of the things you should consider when making the decision.

You need to make a change now. This is probably the biggest indicator that you should consider moving to a cloud-based communications solution. Replacing or upgrading an internal hardware and/or software infrastructure with new, on-premise technology is normally a long, arduous process.

Take your communications infrastructure for example. You have to determine requirements –and project them out for the next several years – without the benefit of knowing what the economy will bring, what disruptive technologies will be introduced and other future factors. You have to send the project out for RFPs, then review them. Sizable budget needs to be freed up, products ordered, installation performed, the whole system configured and users (and IT staff) trained. By the time you’re done, you could be as much as 36 months down the road – and by then the state of the technology may have drastically changed – or the technology you’ve worked so hard on planning no longer fits the need. Given that the average CIO tenure is roughly four years, it does not leave much time to demonstrate an ROI.

Moving communications technology to the cloud, however, saves much of that time because the steps to implementation have already been taken care of by the cloud provider. Sure, you still have to determine requirements and seek RFPs from the providers. But the bulk of the infrastructure you’ll need is already in place, configured, and ready in cloud providers’ datacenters, which means you can be up and running in half the time or better. And with a significantly simpler pricing model and fewer “hidden” charges, it is easier to calculate cost and project ROI.

In addition, now that you are on an “ever-green” platform, you are much more immune to a disruptive change in technology, since a reputable cloud service provider is doing the work behind the scenes so you’re never stuck paying for yesteryear’s technology tomorrow.

You need greater flexibility or scalability. Along with speed to implementation goes speed to make adjustments. Organizations today are continuously looking to reinvent their businesses, and tap new markets while potentially shrinking or eliminating others. Supply and demand is being reviewed on a global scale. As a result, IT is constantly being asked to move at speed of change and to continuously shift assets.

Unless you can find a way to freeze time, things are always going to change. The question is how much? And how much time/how many resources do you have available to react?

Look at the impact unified communications has had on IT. First, IT has taken on the management of all voice traffic and the systems behind it – something that used to be handled by separate telecommunications specialists. The wider use of video, both for individual calls and for larger conferences and presentations, is taking up more time as well as network bandwidth. Add in the challenge of coordinating multiple offices in multiple locations as well as remote workers and it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with the demands. Especially when IT is also being asked to do all of this with fewer resources.

With your communications in the cloud, you simply tell the provider what needs to be done and changes are performed as rapidly as you’ve specified in your service level agreements. You can request MACs (moves, adds, changes) with a single phone call or email – oftentimes with no additional work required on the part of yourself or your staff. Which, of course, frees you and your staff to spend time focused on strategic priorities, not on infrastructure management.

You’re going global. If you think managing a communications infrastructure within North America is tough, wait until you leave the hemisphere. Regulation and legal requirements that vary by country can cause organizations to stall when it comes to bringing their users to the same communications platform. Vendor sourcing and billing can become very complex in a hurry, and it is often difficult to provide technical support to users across multiple geographies.

Then there is the question of achieving ROI. In North American applications, we frequently look at PSTN centralization via SIP trunking as a way to pay for our projects. When it comes to international locations, however, this is a tall order.

Cloud-based communications providers that deliver global services face the same challenges. But they have already tackled and resolved the complexities so you don’t have to worry about them.

Your users are using their own devices. The idea of IT controlling the technology corporate users employ to access information is about as quaint as the thought of them all having PCs on their desks. Today, the consumerization of IT means users are accessing data through smartphones, tablets, phablets and other devices they supply themselves. Trying to allow access internally for all those devices, with all their various nuances, is doomed to fail.

Then there’s the matter of how those devices have conditioned end-users. They are not patient. More often than not, they’re not willing to wait two minutes to get what they think they need. If they need something and it’s not readily available internally, they’ll pop out to the app store for their device and download it. Even if it violates corporate policy.

Increasingly, hosted communications providers are able to fully support the range of tools users need, and make it easy for them to do their jobs. The providers will be focused on whatever their specialty is, and ensure that the services they’re offering meet nearly every user need. And if there is a gap, the cloud provider will have the resources to close it quickly, helping maintain a greater degree of standardization while improving security.

In spite of the hype that swirled around cloud-based solutions years ago, there are many very good reasons to move – born out of real-world, practical experiences. This is perhaps most true for a type of service like communications.

Just as we can all look at actual clouds and see something different in them, whether you need to move to the cloud or not is a matter of perspective. Take the time to understand your situation thoroughly, and you’ll be sure to have blue skies ahead.

Goran Velickovski is Director of Engineering for West IP Communications, a provider of cloud-based communications for enterprise and mid-market companies (www.westipc.com).