In 2020, we’ve seen to what happens when companies roll out cloud collaboration solutions in a hurry. Forced by the COVID-19 pandemic to support remote work in new ways, many organizations struggled to deploy tools that met their performance needs, complied with their data safety regulations or even addressed their employees’ most common use cases.

With the lessons of 2020 still fresh, now is a great time for IT and business leaders to build an implementation roadmap for tools such as Microsoft Office 365. Here are seven steps they should consider along the way.

For many organizations, a migration to public cloud is seen as a technical challenge with a set of tasks that need to be completed. In reality, it is far more than that, with areas outside of technology that need to be considered.

This blog post will touch on some of the more pertinent areas of your business that should be considered in your migration to the public cloud.

Roughly a decade ago, many businesses moved from legacy PBX (or private branch exchange) phone systems to on-premises Voice over IP (VoIP) systems. In more recent years, some organizations have taken the next step and moved away from on-premises to embrace cloud collaboration suites that incorporate voice, video, persistent chat, file sharing and other features in a hosted model with simplified management.

Still, many companies maintain their on-premises systems. Leaders at these organizations know they’ll likely need to deploy a cloud collaboration suite eventually. But to get the most value out of both their existing systems and their future solutions, they must carefully consider when, why and how to make the move.

Becoming an Azure Expert MSP required a companywide effort spanning multiple teams, bringing together expertise from across our global organization. We worked extremely hard to demonstrate to an independent third party that our experience in these solutions is best in class.

So what does this status mean for customers? That through our CDW Amplified™ Azure Managed Services, we provide consistent processes, tools, skills and technology to ensure successful delivery of repeatable, complex solutions based on Microsoft Azure. Learn more about our three-step approach.

The public cloud hasn’t yet become the most popular place to host a customer engagement center — but it will. The shift is inevitable, as the benefits of migrating a customer engagement center to the public cloud are simply too powerful to ignore.

The move can bring many of the same benefits as other cloud migrations, including increased scalability and flexibility as well as the ability to shift from a capital expense (CAPEX) financing model to an operating expense (OPEX) model. Perhaps even more important, a cloud customer engagement center allows organizations to rapidly adopt new services, which get pushed out automatically as vendors update their products. The ability to roll these out as they become available is extremely valuable.

Still, moving to a cloud customer engagement center isn’t a matter of a simple lift and shift. Here are four steps organizations should take to successfully migrate their customer engagement centers to the public cloud.

The global pandemic and social distancing measures have redefined the office for many people. Industries that never would have considered allowing their office employees to work from home were forced to rethink decades of business as usual.

This change has also brought new technology needs. Since these businesses had built technology infrastructures that relied on traditional network and application architecture, a shift had to occur. Suddenly, IT departments were dealing with overloaded VPNs or having to deploy a VPN that they never had to maintain before. Compound that with the fact that users are now accessing company resources from networks or assets that corporate IT has no control over, that most home routers are still vulnerable to exploitation and that, in many cases, the network gates were flung open in the name of productivity ― it’s enough to give any CISO an ulcer.

So how can companies mitigate these risks? Now that everyone is settling into a routine and we’re adjusting to this “new normal,” it’s an ideal time to reach out to your users and talk about security.