8 Steps to Moving Collaboration to the Cloud8 Steps to Moving Collaboration to the Cloud
Successful migrations to the cloud are dependent on understanding your network, choosing a solution that fits your business, and training users, among other factors.
February 2, 2020
Many large enterprises today are moving their collaboration solution from a dedicated in-house infrastructure to a cloud-based solution, such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, or Zoom. The cloud transition causes changes for users, network teams, video collaboration teams, and IT metrics reporting. Collaboration is often used across the organization and by top management, so getting full visibility into an organization might be difficult, which can create problems when transitioning. Collaboration is often used across the organization and by top management which means hiccups that occur after rollout get high visibility. Avoid these with good planning and pre-rollout execution.
There are many issues to consider when an enterprise takes on a transition, which I hope to outline in this article. So, think of this article as a guide that outlines the questions and identifies which teams need to be in the room when you plan this change.
1. Choosing a Solution
Vendors are knocking on your door and showing you the value of their solutions every day. The real challenge is to define the needs of your company. What are the capabilities that will best serve your organization? A good collaboration solution can accelerate the pace of business within your company, but some companies will have to grow into an understanding of how to use it.
Here are some other questions to ask before choosing a solution:
What collaboration are you hoping to enable? Employees within departments or across departments and wide geographies? Are you hoping to collaborate with customers, vendors, or outside services that support your business?
Where are your users doing business (office, home, on-the-go)? These questions will drive the type of devices that have to be supported (phones, laptops, room systems).
What types of interactions will you be supporting? A distributed meeting is different than a joint working session. A teaching environment needs additional capabilities. Do you need language translation services in your meeting? Do you need automated note-taking?
Think broadly about your business and which portions can be enhanced by collaboration technology. Have a conversation with enterprise business leaders to see how they could use collaboration to help drive revenue, reduce costs, reduce time to market, or whatever other parameters. Even if it isn’t possible to support all the opportunities you uncover, you will have an ongoing roadmap of how the solutions should evolve over time to better support your enterprise. And you can tackle the capabilities incrementally based on which uses show the biggest returns.
2. Choosing a Vendor
Determining who to work with will largely be based on the solution itself and the flexibility of it to meet your specific needs, plus the usual parameters of reliability, cost, and business relationships. Think about users when making this choice as well – users hate abrupt transitions. They might not care who the vendor is, but they will care about the tool. New technologies are adopted more quickly when they look and feel like old technology. For example, you can drive a new car off the lot because the steering wheel, directional blinker, accelerator, and brakes all work the way they did in your old car; you don’t need three weeks of training to start using it.
Then, there are the technical challenges to ensure the vendor solution is compatible with your environment, including your existing video conferencing rooms, equipment, monitors, laptops, and phones. Test out how well these pieces work both inside and outside the corporate network. Learn what modifications will be required to the corporate firewalls to support the solution at scale and discuss those changes with your security team (see security below). This is where a proof-of-concept test is needed, followed by a beta test on the corporate network. Don’t skip either step, or the surprises will slow you down.
3. Keeping it Secure
The corporate security team must be an integral part of the conversation and the transition. If you bring them into the room and outline the goals in concert with the rest of the team, they will work with you to find an acceptable solution that allows the collaboration and keeps the company safe.
There are numerous parts of the security challenge, including:
Collaboration equipment must be kept secure to make sure it isn’t picking up viruses or isn’t open to external attack. Also, make sure users aren’t reconfiguring it or unplugging cables, preventing the room from being operational for the next meeting.
Communications between the collaboration equipment and the cloud provider must be secure, so you know who is in your meetings and who is listening. Make sure all network connections are operating with encryption, especially older SIP or H.323-based rooms.
The corporate network security must be maintained, while the collaboration solution wants many ports opened on the firewall. Collaboration solutions require audio and video streams initiated both inside and outside of the firewall to be allowed. But we don’t want nefarious third parties taking advantage of those ports to gain access to the corporate network. Work with the cloud provider to get a detailed and limited set of subnets that can make collaboration connections in and out of your organization and determine the appropriate set of rules to support them.
Lastly, think about the personally identifiable information (PII) created as a part of your collaboration solution. Individual users doing collaboration are using their email address as an identifier. Room systems may be named for the executive who owns the conference room or personal system. Call data records created and stored by your cloud vendor can be used to identify who is talking to whom, how often, and for how long. This information may allow third parties to guess about business processes or business plans you would rather not get out. IP addresses can potentially be used to identify where users live or work. The GDPR laws in Europe mandate protecting this information, and U.S. states are starting to require this as well.
4. Understanding Network Challenges
When moving from an in-house to a cloud-based service, we change the network paths used by our collaboration traffic. Analysis must be done to determine how these new paths will be impacted (primarily, by bandwidth consumption) and how we can maintain a high quality (low loss) transport for the collaboration traffic.
Implementation of additional Internet connection points or a transition to an SD-WAN strategy can have a key impact on these paths, their quality, their manageability, and on the network costs. Reducing network costs with the right design can be a big benefit of the cloud transition.
Using the Webinar features of some cloud-based collaboration solutions may have yet another impact on the network design and needs to be carefully considered. This is an area where surprises tend to have high visibility we prefer to avoid.
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5. Addressing Solution Management Challenges
How an enterprise manages a cloud-based solution is quite different than an in-house infrastructure. What kind of availability can your service provider guarantee? Have we designed the network paths for sufficient redundancy to support those goals? What are the incentives in place to push the service provider towards higher availability, and will they be sufficient to move the needle?
Does your provider have a customer success team, and how effective is that team on meeting your changing collaboration needs? Old school companies don’t necessarily understand a customer success-based approach and may not be responsive. Having an empowered customer success advocate can make a big difference in the service you receive.
On the enterprise side, having an executive sponsor is key to success, especially during a transition. The executive sponsor models the new approach an enterprise wants their users to adopt and pushes other parts of the organization to follow their example. An executive sponsor plays a key role (along with the CIO) in engaging with the service provider management to encourage them to up their game, whether it be in terms of feature set or reliability or analytics. The best sponsor is a business manager within the organization where the collaboration solution is integral to their business delivery, not just a part of the expected infrastructure of the organization.
6. Financial Justification
No matter how good an idea is, it needs a financial justification to get the approval of top management for moving forward – this is a key part of the planning process.
Hard savings are the best way to get the attention of your CFO. If there are clear metrics where a change to the proposed cloud-based collaboration can save money, it will get the most attention, even if these savings are relatively mild. Think about tackling the current audio-conferencing solution as a source of money, or the maintenance contracts and in-house support costs of your in-house infrastructure.
Travel savings are the next category which can be slightly softer. They harden up if there is an overall corporate strategy to cut back on travel and move towards remote collaboration, often accompanied by a travel cost reduction edict.
The softest cost savings are in increased productivity. Although this component can often be absolutely the best dollar justification for moving to a more broadly used collaboration solution, it’s the hardest to pin down in actual numbers. If you have use cases from specific businesses in the organization where a business manager will stand behind some numbers, either in increased revenue or reduced costs, these can provide substantial justification. A broader claim of “increased productivity” will likely be discounted by the CFO or eliminated from the analysis.
7. End-User Preparation
Once the decision has been made to transition, think about the users who will have to change how they do business. No one really wants to change what they do now. They want to spend their mental energy on the work challenges that drive their portions of the business, not on how to use a new collaboration solution. So, we must make this as easy for them as possible.
A whole basket of approaches are available for helping users move to the new solution easily, and often the whole basket is needed, including educational sessions, local experts, regular updates on progress and successes, a well-maintained website with how-to information, a dedicated hot-line for collaboration support, and special training for executive administrators.
8. Don’t Forget Analytics and Quality of Experience
Analytics can give the IT management team clear insight into how well the technology is being used, and how much stress it is putting on the network. Design your analytics to support business needs. I have seen many analytics solutions that provide detail and roll-ups that are easy to produce, with beautiful graphs and PDF reports that go into inboxes and are never read. It’s the reports that are more challenging to produce that are worth reading and that create actionable data to support the business.
The number of users who are enabled to use the solution (have a license or login) is only useful during roll-out. The goal should be to get everyone enabled, have a process that enables new employees, and discontinue access for those that leave. Once you have this, the statistic is no longer useful.
The number of meetings or meeting minutes held during a month or a week is useful during rollout and is an overall measure of the adoption of the technology. It may be useful to help justify the vendor costs or to calculate a reduction in carbon footprint or potential travel costs. But it doesn’t tell you about the stress the solution is putting on the infrastructure.
Peak concurrent usage at key network points is a very useful measurement. For instance, this measurement can tell us how many users there are and how much bandwidth is being consumed at the New York Internet access point during peak usage periods of the day. This metric tells you if the Internet access link in New York is oversubscribed and needs an upgrade.
And don’t forget quality of experience. This is a tough one. What you really want is a direct metric of how well the collaboration solution is doing for your users. This includes how easy it is to schedule a call, how easy it is to initiate a call, how reliably the solution works and the quality of the experience in the call such as audio quality, video quality, ability to share content, ease of call initiation and ease of bringing additional parties into the call. Also, consider direct user feedback as a metric to be tracked and trended.
Summary
In order to have a successful transition, support teams must work together to address the challenges listed above. Don’t be discouraged, this is all do-able. Spin up the necessary groups, plan-out a timeline, get to work, and stay connected to each group to ensure all components are prepared before going live. Use an Agile approach to knock down key components of the transition one by one, applying support to teams whenever they stall out. The benefits to the enterprise are significant, and the sooner they start, the better the return both for the enterprise and for the IT management team.
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