Rethinking On-Premises with Hybrid and Multicloud

Contact centres are hurtling toward digital transformation at breakneck speeds. And as the race to the cloud intensifies, a lot of contact centres worry their long-time, highly customised on-premises customer experience solutions might be cast to the side in a rip-and-replace scenario. For some, it feels personal.

Many of these premise-based or private cloud contact centres have been the backbone of companies’ customer experience technologies. This is especially true for those who have invested both money and time to create uniquely customised and high-value personal experiences for their customer base. To do this, they’ve assembled integrated best-of-breed on-premises technologies and applications.   

From years of working with clients, I’ve seen the time, effort and commitment it took to research, select and then integrate these “best of” contact centre solutions, which include everything from ACD, IVR, automated dialer, call recording, workforce management and more – all from multiple vendors. It required investments in a resilient infrastructure to support peak load. And it meant training IT and business resources to configure, integrate and support these multivendor applications. But the payoff was worth it; businesses were rewarded with efficient operations, high customer satisfaction scores and desired customer journeys – albeit piecemealed, at times.

The pressure to move on-premises systems to the cloud continues to increase. And there are a variety of drivers. For example, innovations stemming from artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning rely on the cloud’s massive computing power. These include self-service bots, predictive customer experience algorithms for routing and engagement and even AI-based workforce engagement insights for training and retaining the best customer experience talent. There’s pressure to incorporate new messaging channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger – ideally while keeping the on-premises infrastructure.  

While there’s a desire to remain with their current on-premises solution, most companies still want to enjoy overall cloud benefits like global resiliency and elasticity. They also like cloud’s continuous delivery process, which allows them to upgrade to new features and functionality with no downtime. All these benefits are either too cumbersome to accomplish or not possible with on-premises or hosted deployments.  

Get the Best of Both Worlds 

There two architecture strategies for existing on-premises or hosted solutions that also enable you to incorporate innovations and enjoy the benefits of cloud are hybrid cloud architecture and a multicloud architecture. Let’s take a look at each of them.

Hybrid cloud architecture. A hybrid cloud enables an on-premises contact centre to combine with, or extend to, a single or multiple public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, OpenShift Online or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). A properly architected hybrid cloud lets your premise-based contact centre bridge the gap between on-premises and public clouds, while containing costs – without sacrificing performance. Hybrid cloud gives you these high-level benefits: 

• Cloud bursting 
• Cloud-delivered innovations 
• Instant, global availability of applications 
• Higher level of security 
• Hybrid cloud storage 

Multicloud architecture. A multicloud architecture combines – in a single network architecture – public and private cloud environments operated by different vendors. This approach uses hosted application services, cloud computing, storage and data services from multiple cloud provider entities (private, hosted, IaaS, Platform as a Service, Software as a Service). Multicloud offers these benefits: 

• Cloudification of on-premises or hosted 
• Cross-cloud deployment 
• Continuous innovation 
• Infrastructure resilience and scale 
• No single vendor lock-in 
• Superior security and control 

Flexibility to Differentiate Your Customer Experience 

Many Genesys Multicloud CX^TM customers are already leveraging these two architecture strategies to get the best of all worlds. They’re future proofing their contact centres while simultaneously harnessing the benefits of public and private clouds. And they’re doing it without leaving behind all those years they used to build unique customer experiences into their ecosystems, including existing on-premises systems and applications.   

Genesys Multicloud CX customers deploy contact centre technology based on their cloud strategy – public, private or mixed – with a choice of IaaS providers, including Microsoft Azure, AWS, OpenShift and Google. Not only can you offer a unique experience to your customers, that flexibility extends to subscription plan pricing – giving you boundless options for long-term growth. 

Learn how you can keep your best-of-breed tech stack and reap the benefits of the cloud in this webinar!