The Pitfalls of Lifting and Shifting Your Phone System from Premise to Cloud
This is more of a rant than it is a tip and trick or advice, or maybe it is advice, and it has to do with, phone systems. And something that I've seen go horribly wrong over and over and over again, which is this idea that you can lift and shift a on premise phone system to some sort of hosted phone system. And by the way, I don't care if they call it hosted or cloud or, you know, it's in our data center and you connect to it or whatever it is. And and without, getting way too technical on this, I'm gonna tell you why. In the voice over IP world, commonly SIP, you have, a lot of things at work and provide different functions.
Speaker 1:So when a user connects and authenticates with your system, you have a registration server. You might have a proxy server. You might have a session border controller. You have some sort of a media, you know, and and this is, typically, you know, expressed in a bunch of different ways. But the big issue here is that when a system is on premise and you have direct access between media and the server, AKA the phone can connect to the server directly that's in your office versus taking it off premise, things have to change.
Speaker 1:A behavior has to change. So, one of the basic things for instance is, if you have, lines, shared line, and you wanna have a phone with a boss and their assistant, or you just wanna have an extension, a line that shows up on multiple devices at the same time. When you move from on prem where the phones can talk directly to the server with nothing in between them to something connected via the Internet, all of a sudden now the phones are connected to that something via the Internet with, a shared IP address. So it's something via the Internet needs to understand with each one of those line registrations that it's not actually just the same phone registering and reregistering and reregistering. And what happens a lot of times with these systems is, the first phone will register and will connect, and then the second phone will register and the first phone will get deregistered effectively, and the third phone will register and nothing just works right.
Speaker 1:The second place, where this creates a a a big mess is, usually in contact center software. So if you're if you're using some sort of on premise phone system with an on premise contact center, that on premise contact center is injecting itself into, into the media path. And it's it's either functioning in this what's called a b to b way, a back to back user agent, or, you know, there's something else going on, but it it can effectively sit and function in between, what you would consider to be like your PBX, your server, your phone server, phone system server, and the actual phone itself. Now why this is a problem is not I mean, first off, it's the same problem as what I was saying before. It's just moving this into the cloud or moving this onto the Internet causes complications.
Speaker 1:But usually in a contact center, you have a piece of software that's running on the the agent's desktop that's actually doing things for you. So it could be as basic as screen pop. So when you receive a phone call, your application can pop up. Your CRM can load on the screen automatically with the caller details or, you know, you're you're maintaining dispositions or you have a dialer software, all these different things. Well, now that dialer needs to be enabled to interact with your phone, which also needs to be able to interact with a server, which needs to be able to interact with the contact center software.
Speaker 1:Now if you just go and lift and shift and try to lift and shift this whole thing into the cloud, again, into the cloud, basically, off your premise into somebody else's platform, your network architecture has to change as well. So now the phones are usually on their own VLAN with their own VPN connected into the provider's network, but your desktops also need to be able to connect via a VPN and connect onto the provider's network. And then if you introduce remote or work from home stations, this complicates things either further because now are these phones behind a VPN with access into the provider's network. And then what are you doing with a VPN? Does that VPN need to connect to your corporate resources, Or does that VPN need to connect into the provider's network as well?
Speaker 1:So these things all of a sudden, what what what starts off as like an, oh, let's just move, you know, our, Cisco call manager with a c c one agent into, you know, something else, it it it really quickly spirals out of control into a whole slew of issues that you're gonna have to contend with. Now the other side of this is when you're not talking about lift and shift, you're talking about changing software and changing functionality and changing the usability of these systems. The biggest problem this comes into is if you're using the system in a way different from how it was designed. So if if you've somewhere along the lines decided that we wanna hack our, inbound based contact center to also do reporting for us for an outbound based outbound based calling because we wanna track sales efficiency, That contact center software is not a sales enablement tool. It's not designed to do that.
Speaker 1:And so when you take and you look at inbound contact center software and you try to shoehorn outbound functionality into that, that's really like a sales enablement functionality, Things don't line up right anymore, and people are gonna be unhappy with you. So, you know, this is a, you know, you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't kinda thing. But, you know, along those lines, it's a, my point with all this is this isn't you can't just take and look at something that's running in your office or running on your premise and say, hey. Let's just take this thing and move this somewhere else. There's a lot of network design that goes into it.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of implications that go into this. There's a lot of, interactions with applications that you have to deal with, and contend with. And and just shifting this more than likely is gonna create more problems for you than they're gonna solve. So before you go down this path, make sure you actually understand how does this application work? What does your network architecture look like?
Speaker 1:How do users interact with it? Where do your users sit? How do they interact with things? And, you know, and it might be in your best interest I'm not gonna say it might be. It's probably gonna be in your best interest to figure out how to go through, a migration to a different platform and really understand what your business needs in that platform and how to map the business needs with the proper software in the first place to accomplish what it is that you're trying to do.
Speaker 1:So instead of shoehorning something that you're currently running on premise, probably was shoehorned and and mutated and and etcetera over the time. Taking it from a start from scratch, approach and finding something that makes more sense for you in in today's world.
