Determining the Right Data Center Architecture for Your Organization

Many of the customers I interact with have on-premises data centers, and they swear that they will never go to the cloud. On the other side of the spectrum, some customers have fully embraced cloud, to the point where they are running all their workloads in the cloud. In the middle, I have customers who are running some applications in the cloud and some on-premises—a hybrid environment, if you will. As a Solutions Architect, I feel the need to expand on why organizations choose between these varying architectures when designing their data center.

A business process outsourcing (BPO) provider with 5,000 global agents was primarily focused on customer experience and contact center outsourcing for large companies. Like many in its industry, the BPO ran on very tight margins and wanted to move away from spending capital money. It preferred operational expenses because it billed its customers on a monthly usage basis (i.e., how many phone calls it took), so it desired to match its cost structure with its revenue structure. Having to pay money upfront with the hope that the customers would use the system would not benefit the BPO; instead, it desired for its underlying technology and business costs to be paid when its clients made payments. For this reason, an “As-a-Service” model best suited the BPO from a financial and technology perspective.

I recently had a meaningful conversation with a customer as we spoke of a three-year plan to move “everything” into the cloud. I hear this statement over and over again, and it always brings visions to my mind of jumping into the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim. For most, the perception is that the cloud provides a robust data center for multiple use cases—anywhere from dev, test, disaster recovery, and, of course, production workloads. Organizations look to the cloud as a way to solve their challenges in operating on-premises primary, secondary, or multi-tier data centers. I certainly agree with that mindset. Cloud would not be a multibillion-dollar business today if it wasn’t ready for primetime. 

I’ll start by answering a question that immediately comes to mind: What, exactly, does multi-cloud mean? When we reference a multi-cloud environment, we’re talking about an organization that utilizes some combination of one or more public and/or private clouds to power their critical applications and workloads. For example, an organization may utilize Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its mainstream applications, Google Cloud for machine learning (ML)-centric workloads, and a private on-premises cloud for compliance-governed applications. Sound complicated? It is. 

Most data centers host hundreds—if not thousands—of applications that run business- and mission-critical operations. As organizations consider moving to the cloud, they are faced with questions on how these applications will fit into their cloud strategy and how they can migrate their workloads to a cloud platform with the least risk and disruption to their business.

ConvergeOne recently announced the availability of ConvergeOne Secure Connect, our new software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) managed services offer. In a nutshell, Secure Connect is a subscription-based, fully-managed SD-WAN that connects our customers’ networks to ConvergeOne Cloud Experience (C1CX) collaboration solutions. I know what you may be thinking: What is SD-WAN? It’s one of those terms that we’ve all heard of before, but few know what it really is, and why it’s a hot topic. Let’s dive a little deeper into SD-WAN and explore why Secure Connect is such a cool offer.

With Avaya ENGAGE quickly approaching, we decided to check in with ConvergeOne thought leaders—who will be presenting at 27 sessions during the event—to get a sense of what we can expect. These are the primary themes that emerged.

While many organizations have begun to move Unified Communications (UC) and Contact Center (CC) applications to the cloud, their cloud journeys are nowhere near complete. Organizations in the midst of this transition would benefit from taking the time to build a smarter path to the cloud by developing a comprehensive cloud strategy that addresses their specific business needs. There is no doubt that the cloud is an incredible business enabler that helps organizations realize a broad range of benefits, including:

The new year is quickly approaching, so there is no better time than now to determine your top business priorities for 2019. Need some help determining what these priorities should be? When a previous year’s Computerworld Tech Forecast survey asked IT executives about their upcoming priorities, the respondents’ top priorities included “improving employee productivity/efficiency” (47%), “improving customer satisfaction/experience” (46%), and “containing costs” (44%). These are all important priorities that will greatly impact the success your business finds in the coming year. However, a difficult question emerges: What steps can your business take to fulfill all of these top priorities?

Technology and customer service go hand-in-hand. Without the right technology, you lack the ability to effectively connect with customers and track those interactions. When your employees are spending a significant amount of time on the phone dealing with customer complaints about your phones systems, you have an issue that demands quick resolution.