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.

Before this spring, many organizations were already set up to accommodate some portion of their employees working remotely. But very few businesses were equipped to handle all of their employees working from home. As a result, many employees saw performance problems and reduced functionality in the very applications they relied on to do their jobs.

It’s been said that we’re living through what is effectively the world’s largest business continuity exercise. Here are three lessons that business and IT leaders should take away from it.

Look at nearly any new offering from the largest names in technology — Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others — and you’re likely to find an accompanying environmental and sustainability initiative.

There’s been a growing awareness in recent years about the impact of energy use by corporate data centers, both on the environment and on organizations’ bottom lines. Public cloud hyperscalers have recognized this concern and have responded by optimizing their environments to help organizations meet their spending and sustainability goals.

As you make decisions about where to place your IT workloads, keep the following considerations in mind.

Often, I hear people talk about hyperconverged infrastructure as though it’s still an emerging, almost experimental solution. But the reality is that many organizations have deployed hyperconvergence — which combines storage, computing and networking into a single system — for years. As these organizations have learned, HCI can have a significant impact on their IT…

Most technology professionals today understand that their companies can’t afford for their IT shops to be stuck in “keep-the-lights-on” mode. Obviously, it’s essential for technology departments to ensure adequate reliability, availability and performance for IT resources. But even if staffers are performing these tasks at the top of their game, an IT shop that stops…

In my previous blog post, I talked about the need for organizations that are making the transition to public cloud to understand the inherent value of being in the cloud. Moving your private infrastructure into a hybrid cloud is not enough. You need to focus on transforming people, processes and technology in a way that…