We recently completed a 14-city roadshow speaking with customers about cloud solutions and business drivers. We wanted to hear what the cloud means to today’s businesses and ensure that our portfolio addresses their needs.
Our team captured the insights, noting commonalities around the most pressing concerns and challenges IT professionals and business executives encounter when considering a move to the cloud. Here is what we learned.
Challenges, Concerns, + Confusion around Cloud
Thematically, we noticed that there is a lot of confusion about what the cloud is or should be. Often, larger-than-life expectations stand in the way of businesses reaping the benefits of the cloud, not just “someday” but right now.
Do any of these challenges sound familiar?
"We’re trying to do more with less... and that doesn’t necessarily mean less money."
The edict to do more with a constrained budget is nothing new—and it continues to be a big challenge for many businesses. The difference today is the demand on IT teams to spend more time and energy on customers and front-office technology in addition to maintaining and supporting core systems and back-office integration.
Of course, there are also businesses for which “do more with less” still means making do with fewer dollars and cents. This is true even in the face of the directive to update core systems and adopt new strategies for winning customers and remaining competitive in the digital age.
We say: "You can use the cloud to overcome budgets and IT resources that are stretched to the max."
As Gartner points out in its top 10 cloud myths, “Executive mandate does not a cloud strategy make.” That being said, embracing the cloud and finding ways to use it to maximum advantage can be a crucial competitive tool in today’s market. The good news is you can have a cloud experience that helps you do more with a limited budget or IT resources.
Partnering with a cloud provider, you can outtask your day-to-day telephony and/or data system management and monitoring to us—freeing your IT team to focus on meeting front-office needs and developing new apps that will improve the customer experience.
We’re already managing a complex environment—I can’t imagine adding the cloud and getting it all to work.
We get it. There are so many circumstances that add to the complexity of today’s technology environments. For instance:
- Geographically separate locations with different platforms.
- Mergers and acquisitions of companies with significant investments in a mix of vendor solutions.
- Company divisions with different business models whose technology may or may not be the same today.
- Large organizations with separate networks for different tenants, versus one centrally managed network backbone.
- “Home-grown” client-server applications.
We say: It’s a universal technology truth that you don’t need single-vendor technology—you need one cloud partner.
Just as there isn’t only one vendor solution for most businesses, there isn’t only one cloud answer to any challenge.
In fact, as Gartner points out, because the use of cloud services is increasingly varied and diverse, it’s important to establish a cloud strategy that accommodates many different options—cloud and non-cloud, and able to support multiple manufacturer technologies.
[Webinar] ConvergeOne Cloud Experience: A Smarter Path to the Cloud
Join us on February 15th at 12 pm EST to learn more about ConvergeOne Cloud Experience, known as C1CX, a game-changer for moving any UC or CC application, from any platform, to the cloud.
Topics: Cloud
