4 Guidelines to Ease Your On-Premises to Cloud Journey

There’s a clear advantage to moving your customer experience ecosystem to the cloud. For traditional on-premises customers, those advantages are immediate cost savings realisation with optimised resource usage, the ability to quickly scale up/down, being able to leverage latest feature sets on platform without the need for custom installations, quicker deployments and faster value realisations on ROI. But, along with all the positive promise, this cloud journey introduces a lot of changes within traditional organisations and you need to make several decisions.

In Genesys Professional Services, it’s our mission to work with you to make this move as seamless as possible so you can leverage the true power of cloud. We understand that most cloud projects have very high visibility within organisations and Genesys Professional Services plays a critical role in enabling you along the way.

Based on our experience of migrating various self-service applications in the cloud for customers (varying in complexity and scale), here are few guidelines to ease your cloud journey and deliver positive, reliable and repeatable outcomes.

  1. Focus on the business case: This is a great time for traditional on-premises customers to go back to the drawing board and prioritise top business cases and goals for cloud migration. It’s likely that during the migration journey, you might not get an exact as-is feature parity, but rather a like-for-similar option. Or, in some cases, you’ll discover a more efficient, but different approach toward achieving the same functionality and business goals. Having clear business goals and priorities communicated across the board will align your internal technical teams, business stakeholders and vendor teams to carefully evaluate options when you reach a fork in the road of the cloud journey.
  1. Audit and evaluate existing platforms and on-premises applications: This step requires a bit of housekeeping in terms of collecting and organising documentation of the most current state of all existing platform components, integrations, security and compliance-mandatory requirements, third-party dependencies, and complete end-to-end workflows of the outlined customer experience journey. A bird’s eye view of the entire solution, as well as technical deep-dive documentation, will set a baseline for all stakeholders involved. Prioritise requirements in your cloud journey based on “must haves” (non-negotiable functionality like security and compliance requirements), “good to have” platform and cloud tool feature sets and “dispensable feature functionality” for each component in your solution. This will help drive a more focused discussions during discovery, identify gaps, create mitigation strategy and understand true need for custom solutions, if necessary, early in the migration process.
  1. Expect the need for cultural and mindset changes: Many legacy solutions come with a bit of history. As solutions have evolved, technologies and processes that might have been cutting-edge at one point are now viewed as cumbersome and patchy. With more efficient cloud tools and services, it could be possible to achieve the same end goal — but with a different approach. It’s critical to get away from the “This is how it’s always been done” approach. Challenge the team to explore and expand their vision to drive a more efficient and lighter, off-the-shelf solution, if available — especially when exact parity doesn’t exist.
  1. Go agile and celebrate incremental wins: A cloud migration often is viewed as a great opportunity to rethink and re-engineer the solution. It’s also important to keep an eye on the most important goal of immediate ROI realisation. Champion the entire team to plan a staggered approach for project delivery early on, as business and technical teams enthusiastically have a stream of ideas flowing in to use migration as a redesign opportunity. Take a phased approach that launches like for similar features. Or look to simplified applications for the initial cloud deployment, then progressively add functionality. This will get some early quick wins and build confidence around the overall cloud strategy and cloud journey.

Contact Genesys Professional Services today for help mapping out your on-premises to cloud journey.

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