Migrating to UCaaS: Have you factored in visibility and control?

As organisations are returning to a post-pandemic world, digital transformation has a new avatar. In the realm of Unified Communications and Collaboration, this translates to catering to a hybrid workforce with heightened collaboration needs, who want delightful user experiences.  In this blog Aashima Singh, Global Director of Unified Collaboration Services, Tata Communications, explores the future growth of Unified Communications as a service. 

The department of IT is instrumental in ensuring that employee experience helps their organisations increase time to market as well as productivity of the workforce.

Many customers find that moving their collaboration and communication suites to the cloud addresses all these requirements in a streamlined manner. In its Global UCC forecast, IDC estimates that Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) is projected to grow at a 9.3% CAGR between 2020 and 2025, compared with on-premises IP telephony, which will decline 13.2% CAGR during the same period.  UCaaS solutions such as Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex deliver seamless connectivity across borders and help employees work from anywhere without disruptions.

“However, migrating to such cloud solutions is usually complex, has security and compliance implications and can affect user experience in a negative way if not done in a planned and phased manner.”

A well-planned multi-stage migration   

Your managed services provider should ideally partner with you through the stages of migration to UCaaS.

“Assessing the communications landscape in an organisation is crucial, before migrating to a chosen cloud solution. Remote SaaS automated PBX assessment and analysis can help IT teams understand PBX line statistics, feature parity and device inventory as well as call flows, vectors and extension level configuration.”

A migration plan should consist of the source PBX configuration, customer data and target PBX capabilities. Seamless migration typically accounts for co-existence of the legacy PBX and the new cloud solution, especially while validating and provisioning the new state. Number portability, tenant management and MACD services should be made available in a self-service automated portal, thus reducing the migration time and increasing time to market.

The deployment phase needs to cover several elements. One is cloud video interoperability, where organisations are looking to integrate legacy telephony, video conferencing and multiple service providers for these. Regulatory challenges in specific geographies is another challenge, which, coupled with security risks, can lead to penalties or compromises.

“Successful user adoption of a new UCaaS solution is dependent on the user persona and a customised training plan.”

Rather than just sending out a few training videos, if the adoption process covers coaching and training sessions which are tailored for the organisation and role profiles based on usage analysis, the rate of successful adoption can multiply manifold.

Management and measurement of Unified Communications can be rather complex because of the multi-platform and multiple endpoint landscape. A managed service provider should be able to give you performance and service availability measurements such as advanced signalling, packet capture & network telemetry analytics and insights, while supporting change, incident and problem management. Intelligently managing endpoints and collaboration management, when available through a single pane of glass, truly reduces complexity and improves end-user experience.

Tata Communications has enabled multiple global customers through various stages of migration, management and automation as they progressed in their UCaaS journey. If your collaboration journey is with Microsoft Teams, our Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams provides seamless, carrier-grade voice for Microsoft Teams at a global scale.  A digital ecosystem enabler, Tata Communications is an international voice carrier, serving global customers, with multiple industry recognitions and in-house expertise, and is here to empower you with visibility and control as you move to UCaaS.

To learn more, read about Tata Communications Unified Communications as a Service today.