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Migrating your Telephony to the Cloud: the six most important Steps

15. March 2018 Published by Raphael Doerr

As the one who is in charge of telephony, you’re probably not looking for a specific telephone for your organization – you’re looking for a solution to make sure your employees can make their calls. And whether this happens via the cloud or on-premise doesn’t really matter. Does it? Think again. This is the perfect time to consider switching to the cloud, especially now that ISDN is approaching end-of-life and support for this solution will disappear. Does the cloud meet your requirements? And how does such a process work? We list the most important steps of cloud migration.

Map your situation

Do you want to make well-founded decisions? Than mapping your situation is key. It starts with analyzing your practical business wishes. How are the workplaces currently organized? Do your employees have their own desks, or do their workplaces differ every day? Next, take a look at your existing network. Is the local area network (LAN) ready for Voice over IP (VoIP)? Are the cables suitable for Gigabit transfer speeds? What about the bandwidth surrounding your organization? And does the network offer adequate switches? Don’t forget to make a list of the licenses for the telephony software that you currently have in place.

Think about the future

In addition to mapping your situation, it’s also time to take a closer look at your organization’s future growth plans. Will the number of employees remain stable for now, will you be hiring new colleagues in the future, or are you expecting to downsize? All this influences your telephony system choice. The cloud enables you to scale up or down, or, in other words, easily manage growth or downsizing. You pay per user, which ensures the telephony costs are transparent.

Don’t forget about security

An essential element of your assessment is related to rules and regulations. Some organizations (especially in the government industry) are bound by strict rules relating to data storage. This is important to take into account for telephony as well. It’s possible, for example, to set up the cloud telephony system in such a way that certain conversations (for example those taking place internally), don’t take place in the cloud. Moreover, telephony traffic in the cloud offers the possibility to use encryption, which means conversations are always secure.

Invest in customized advice

A professional reseller is able to carefully advise you on the right choice for your organization based on your extensive analysis. Costs will be a key factor in this. Because even if you’re already convinced of the benefits of cloud telephony, if you’ve recently invested heavily in a PBX system, it won’t immediately benefit you to make the switch. And even if your hardware is outdated and in need of replacement, chances are the return on investment might be a little delayed. Take analog phones, for example, which require special adapters to switch to the cloud. The advice might even be to invest in on-premise PBX systems or to only migrate some of your organization to the cloud. This results in a so-called hybrid environment.

Choose auto provisioned implementation

You don’t need to worry about the implementation. Cloud solutions are plug & play: all that needs to be done is to plug in the cables and your employees can start using the system. Many devices – or at least all Gigaset Communications GmbH devices – support auto provisioning. This makes it very easy to connect them to a variety of platforms, including BroadSoft, NFON, TeamFON and Kwebbl, and download both the provider and the user specific parameters. This means that all Internet Services Providers based on such platforms are compatible at the same level.

Don’t worry about management

Management is easy as well. Usually, you – the person who is in charge of telephony or IT – will be given a two-day training by the reseller. Which is enough. You’ll learn all about day-to-day management – from connecting the telephony devices to the cloud network to creating conference rooms – and how to configure the necessary parameters. This way, you’ll easily create the telephony solution that suits your specific situation.

Switching to the cloud can benefit your business. But it’s important to find out if it fits your business and to clearly define an accurate migration process. Only this way, your business will really be future-proof.