Why you should audit your voice services

When you are considering any migration project, careful preparation is key, and moving your voice services to the cloud is no different. Developing a detailed understanding of your existing infrastructure, platforms, providers, users and requirements will help you to accurately calculate the scope of the project, design an effective solution, and prevent setbacks later on.

So, how do you get started?

Auditing your telephony environment

You can begin by reviewing any contracts you have in place, when they expire, and the costs associated with your current voice services. Compile lists of business requirements from different teams, and research the cloud communications solutions available that can address your organization’s priorities, as well as continue to grow with you.

Once you have conducted that preliminary research, you will need to audit your telephony environment and any physical infrastructure within it. Gaining full visibility over your legacy estate prior to creating a migration plan is essential because it will allow you to identify specialized features which will need to be assessed for migration separately, as well as any unused assets in your network that can be retired. Look for opportunities to consolidate services and remove unnecessary assets ahead of the move, so that you don’t waste resources migrating them over to your new system.

To ensure as smooth a migration as possible, you should capture data across your entire telephony environment including:

• • System wide specifications, capabilities, capacity, and power usage
  • Gateways and hardware
  • Models of handsets, endpoints, and configurations with extensions
  • Calling profiles and restrictions
  • PSTN breakouts and other system integration points
  • Hunt and pick-up groups
  • Regional distribution of users and devices
  • User profiles
  • Firmware
  • License usage

Although an important step, collecting all of this information manually can be challenging, especially in multi-site organizations, or those operating in mixed environments that have developed over time. Every platform has its own nuances in the data that is available and how you extract it, and very few of them present that data in compatible formats that make it easy to cross-reference and analyze. All these factors can make it difficult to gain a consolidated view over your whole estate and derive any value from the exercise. To speed up your migration and save time and money, consider using an automated tool to gather the data directly from your systems.

Automating your audit

Where weeks of manual auditing can culminate in incomplete results, presented in a variety of formats and in varying degrees of detail, an automated auditing service, like ReVeal, can process the data from all of your systems at once - in a matter of hours.

As well as fast-tracking your migration to the cloud, using an automated auditing service will help to highlight potential complications such as incompatible devices, and identify areas you can reduce licensing costs. They can provide you with an understanding of your legacy estate so you can establish the baseline for your required feature parity, accurately define the scope of your impending migration, and take full advantage of the benefits of cloud communications, faster than ever.

Accelerate your journey to the cloud with a better, more accurate migration plan

 Designed with multi-site organizations in mind, ReVeal is an automated service from Pure IP that processes all the necessary technical details of your existing telephony environment, and presents it in a user-friendly report perfect for planning your journey to cloud communications. Compatible with multiple platforms, ReVeal examines the raw data from your systems, including all the data points suggested above, gathering valuable insights from your existing communications environment in a fraction of the time a manual audit would take.

Find out more about how you can create an insight-driven migration plan, and save time and money using ReVeal to move to cloud communications with any provider or platform