By maintaining Nortel CS1000 after end-of-service-life many organizations will achieve cost savings, but they will have to wrestle some massive security, resiliency and customer experience questions.
This is the fourth in a series of blogs that look at the big CS1000 lifecycle management challenges. It focuses on the inconvenient truth: that the cloud is the natural home for the voice environment and it poses a coping strategy.
Maintaining Nortel CS1000 through EoSL is not a long-term strategy but a commercially prudent shorter-term fix. Managing cost with the big security, operational, business and customer risks will help organizations today, but won’t obscure the fact that tomorrow belongs to the cloud.
This brings a ton of new risks into play.
It starts with a brutally simple question: how long is it realistic to maintain a low-risk and stable on-premise solution?
Then there’s the risk of limited visibility: if organizations have lost sight of the totality of their voice environment how can they deliver the right cloud applications and can any of the legacy technologies be lifted and loaded?
There are also architectural risks: what is already in cloud and can there be consolidation or is this a full migration?
And probably most critically, there is the need to mitigate the performance risks in a protracted migration – from optimizing CS1000 to the management of the big operational and customer risks in the voice environment pre and during the migration.
Is there an answer?
Create a roadmap to transition from Nortel CS1000 to the cloud
It’s time to be schizophrenic. Plan for the obsolescence of Nortel CS1000 while future-proofing it for the short-term. Here are some thoughts on building a roadmap that will deliver an operationally more impactful migration:
- Combine deeper analysis and smarter design: fully audit the voice architecture, take a holistic view of the entire voice environment and phase a migration plan that manages lifting and loading and targeted application migration.
- Cement the business-critical outcomes of the migration across the organization and for the customer and ceaselessly reference them in the planning process.
- Identify, target and mitigate the big failure points so the cloud migration is lower risk and more seamless and frictionless.
- Understand and mitigate the main security and operational risks of maintaining Nortel CS1000 during a protracted migration.
- Look beyond the planning and migration stage to cloud governance: identify the metrics and KPIs that will define immediate and longer-term success.
In managing Nortel CS1000 through end-of-life, the question is this: how long can it remain a workhorse before it becomes a white elephant?
Conventional logic would say that a blind focus on Nortel CS1000 lifecycle management can only be a jam today strategy. Jam tomorrow demands voice teams look to the lifecycle management of the entire voice environment and how Nortel CS1000 and cloud migration naturally co-exist in a more commercially effective way.
