Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this transformation — forcing enterprises worldwide to enable remote work, stabilize their supply chains, digitize products and handle unprecedented spikes in interactions across non-voice channels like web chat and messaging.

We’re now in a period of consolidation as companies rebalance their technology portfolios in favor of digital solutions. And CIOs are taking a lead role.

For years, CIOs have been moving toward a more centralized role within their organizations. In 2021, CIOs will continue this role, with possible new responsibilities including business strategy, customer centricity, product development and support, business development, business resilience, agility at scale, and ecosystem enablement, according to the OMDIA 2021 Trends to Watch: CIO.

Among the top drivers are agility; the rise of digital platforms; “genuine” enterprise architecture; and the operationalization of artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), internet of things (IoT), and edge computing, according to the report.

Consumers remain at the heart of this rapid digital transformation as organizations strive to deliver consistent, timely and relevant experiences on customers’ preferred channels. For many enterprises, COVID-19 has revealed the shortcomings of legacy on-premises call center solutions for delivering great customer experiences. These IT challenges are expected to continue long after the pandemic.

Today, virtually every organization is on a journey to the cloud, but none of these journeys are exactly alike. And while cloud computing has numerous benefits, moving to the cloud is complex and requires a clear strategy.

Let’s examine some considerations for integrating the cloud into your IT strategy.

Analyze Your Infrastructure, Facilities and Services

Finding the cloud architecture that’s right for your business starts with analyzing your existing operations. Consider your current environment and the infrastructure model you want to deploy: public, private or hybrid. In addition, analyze your geographic footprint, taking into account the locations of your facilities and any regulations you must meet.

You’ll also want to determine whether your IT team will operate and administer the solution or whether a partner will handle some or all of those responsibilities. Let’s dig in deeper into the five aspects of this analysis.

Assess Your Assets and Data Center Lifecycles

Perform an assessment of your business applications and technology stack. Consider the following:

  • Size and complexity of your environment
  • Which technologies are nearing end of life
  • Must-have capabilities and mission-critical features
  • Which systems and applications you’ll need to integrate

There are cloud migration options suitable for specific types of applications. And there are approaches — such as lift and shift and refactoring — that are suited to different cloud use cases. Performing this analysis will determine which option is right for you.

Rationalize Your Network

Make sure your cloud provider supports the following networking requirements:

  • Network traffic isolation that keeps your data safe and secure
  • Flexible interconnection options that provide secure access to your existing on-premises or private network resources
  • Security and privacy compliance even in multi-tenant scenarios with shared storage, networking or applications

Work with your vendor to rationalize your public networking resources so that you can mitigate data breaches, reduce your potential failure points and maintain cost control.

Set Up an IT Service Management for Your Cloud Environment

IT Service Management (ITSM) involves defining policies and procedures around the management of your infrastructure and data center applications, both on-premises and off-site. It boils down to having a defined process around your IT delivery — everything from change management to asset and lifecycle management.

Identify Your Security Needs

Cloud providers strive to offer security and data privacy levels that are better than a prospective customer can achieve on their own — and at no additional cost. Processes and policies encompass security at the network, application and data levels; and at physical locations, along with solutions for backup and disaster recovery.

The Power of a Composable Approach

Many industry experts believe the future of business is composable, and we agree.

We define composable customer experience (CX) as customer and employee experiences that are architected for swift, sustainable differentiation to maximize resiliency and agility. Composable CX enables every layer of the digital business to drive better outcomes by assembling, combining and orchestrating the individual capabilities of core product offerings, robust marketplaces, your greater customer experience ecosystems, and differentiating solutions that use open APIs and developer tools. And it’s all powered by a modern cloud platform that’s operating and evolving at hyperscale.

Compose a Better Future

Genesys provides you with composable CX solutions that meet the unique requirements of your business. No matter which infrastructure model you need, how you want to operate your environment or how you want to build your ecosystem, we have the right solution and services for you.