Most cloud migration strategies are written for infrastructure and data: servers, storage, and applications that can tolerate a few seconds of delay without anyone noticing. Real-time voice and video cannot. That is the gap that catches teams out when a unified communications (UC) migration runs from a generic cloud migration checklist: it was never built to test what actually breaks.
If you are planning to move UC off-premises, or you are partway through an on-premises to cloud migration and things are not going as planned, the problem may not be your cloud provider. Your strategy may have been built for the wrong workload.
A cloud migration strategy for infrastructure asks whether an application still works after the move. A cloud migration strategy for UC has to ask whether it still sounds and looks the same in real time, while people are using it.
Storage and databases tolerate retries, buffering, and brief delays. Voice and video do not. A few hundred milliseconds of jitter may be invisible to a file transfer and immediately audible on a call. Standard migration templates will tell you to inventory applications and set a budget. They will not tell you whether your network can carry 1,000 simultaneous Microsoft Teams calls without the audio breaking up.
Three factors make a UC migration different from a general cloud migration, and each needs its own line item in your strategy.
Before you migrate, build your evaluation around what is specific to UC:
Most enterprises do not move UC to the cloud in one step. A phased, hybrid approach keeps some on-premises infrastructure live while cloud services take on load gradually. This gives you room to identify and correct problems before they affect every user.
A full cutover can work when the existing environment is small enough, or when there is little infrastructure to preserve. For more on the broader business case, see IR’s guide to moving to the cloud.
Whichever path you take, the deciding factor should be how much control you need over the transition, not how quickly a provider can complete it.
Whichever strategy you choose, you need visibility before, during, and after the move. That visibility has to span the mix of on-premises, hybrid, and cloud infrastructure you actually run.
IR Collaborate is powered by the Prognosis platform, giving teams the intelligence to identify degradation in a migrating environment before it reaches the people using it.
A cloud migration strategy is a plan for moving applications, data, or infrastructure from on-premises systems to a cloud environment. For unified communications, it must also account for real-time voice and video performance, not only data transfer.
General cloud migration strategies are built around workloads that can tolerate brief delays, such as file storage or batch processing. UC migrations involve real-time voice and video, which are far less tolerant of latency, jitter, and packet loss.
A hybrid migration keeps some on-premises UC infrastructure running while other services move to the cloud. A full cutover moves the entire environment at once. Hybrid provides more control over pacing and risk; a full cutover is faster but leaves less room to identify issues early.
Include a network readiness assessment, feature parity map, provider evaluation against voice and video SLAs, a hybrid-versus-full-cloud decision framework, quality-based success KPIs, and a rollback plan specific to voice and video.
It depends on the size and complexity of the environment, the number of vendors involved, and whether you choose a phased or full-cutover approach. Multi-vendor, multi-site environments typically take longer and benefit from phased migration.
If you use Microsoft Teams Direct Routing to connect to the public telephone network, an SBC sits between your network and the carrier. Its configuration, capacity, and failover behavior need to be included in the migration plan.
Completion means the environment moved. Success means call and meeting quality held throughout for users and sites. Migration KPIs should therefore include quality metrics, not only completion milestones.
Yes, but monitoring must span on-premises and cloud infrastructure at the same time, across every vendor in the environment. This is the visibility gap IR Collaborate is designed to address during a phased migration.
The organizations that get UC cloud migration right are not necessarily the ones with the fastest migration. They are the ones whose strategy was built for real-time traffic in the first place rather than adapted from a checklist meant for data at rest.
Wherever you land between hybrid and full cutover, that distinction determines whether the move protects the experience your teams and customers rely on.
Ready to check where your network stands before you migrate? Download the Microsoft Teams Migration Checklist or request a demo of IR Collaborate.