In the competitive world of business, where customers have numerous options for every product and service, providing impeccable customer experience becomes critical for brands to not only gauge the attention of customers but also build lifetime customer loyalty. To accelerate CX transformation, businesses need to eradicate disparate legacy systems and deploy agile cloud or hybrid cloud solutions.

According to Gartner, businesses are looking for a shift to the cloud to provide relief from the high maintenance costs of legacy and homegrown CCM systems.

With enhanced security, resilience and performance, cloud and hybrid cloud solutions form the bedrock of delivering total experience solutions at scale. In this blog, we will discuss how cloud migration can help brands accelerate their Customer Experience transformation and deliver Total Experience solutions at scale.

What are the key challenges with Legacy Transformation projects?

The key bottleneck faced by brands while deploying their CCM solutions is the incompatibility of their legacy systems with the latest applications. In addition, legacy and homegrown systems require constant deployments and incur heavy operational costs leading to a delayed time to market, followed by an unsatisfactory employee experience and customer experience.

Top 5 reasons why businesses are moving to cloud

1. Ease of Accessibility

In the digital-first post-pandemic world, connectedness and ease of accessibility is a must. Cloud computing provides a pay-as-you-go pricing model, empowering the businesses with the flexibility to scale up or down as per their unique business requirements. By hosting key business assets and database on the cloud, brands can reduce their capital expenditures as there is no need for them to own and maintain physical servers or data centers.

2. Enhanced Security

Leading cloud computing services like Microsoft or Amazon Web Services have state-of-the-art security capabilities which efficiently protect your data and key business information. It also provides the IT department with a 360-degree view of the business assets and helps them monitor employee access and activities on the go. With automated notifications, cloud and hybrid cloud service providers help ensure the safety and data integrity of your business and the entire network.

3. More predictable costs

Legacy applications involve multiple expenses for businesses associated with the purchase of servers, licenses and hardware. However, cloud costs depend on the user-count and the features required, so businesses can easily budget and map their investments and preserve capital expenditures.

4. Faster Deployment

As opposed to legacy applications which require lengthy hardware procurements and staging cycles, cloud migration and developing cloud native applications can be easily accomplished within a few days. Application enhancements can be easily assessed, rolled out and scaled as per the unique needs of the business. The faster deployment also improves the time to market.

5. Risk Reduction

Leveraging legacy applications on aging hardware platforms is risky and can lead to various security threats. Cloud providers constantly update tools, deploy necessary security patches and provide 24X7 network monitoring, which reduces the risk of security breaches significantly.

Espire’s Seamless 5-Step Cloud Migration Approach

1. Validate your Migration Goals

The first and the foremost step for a successful cloud migration is to connect with all the key stakeholders and prioritize applications to be migrated to cloud as well as decide the timelines associated with your cloud migration process.

2. Confirm your Cloud Service Provider

While choosing a compatible cloud service provider, apart from the business goals, we keep in mind the following:

• Security (Data Encryption, In-Transit, REST, Identity Management, Network Security, End Point Security, database security, internet security, etc.)
• Compliance (HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR, Governance related, CCPA, NIST, etc.)
• Service Levels (Availability, Scalability, Performance, Disaster Recovery, etc.)
• Cost (CAPEX, OPEX, Implementation Cost, Upgrade, Migration, Development, Managed Service, Service Extension, Licenses, Infra, Securities, Throughput, etc.)
  
  

3. Document your Migration Plan

Our team of experts create a step-by-step migration plan which includes:

• The order in which applications will be migrated
• Architecture - Existing and To-Be
• Metrics to determine if the migration is successful
• Responsibilities - who does what?
• A detailed activity timeline
• Required resources
• A breakdown of process changes as a result of the migration
• Technical and end-user training required
  
  

4. Execute the Migration

During the execution, all data and server backups are taken to safeguard key business assets. Once the cloud environment has been set up, all the data and applications are migrated. Once the migration is complete, our experienced team validates and tests if the migration is successful.

5. Post Cut-Over - Final Steps

As the final step of the cloud migration process, our team deploys cloud monitoring tools and sets up a robust problem reporting and tracking system to troubleshoot any problems. We also created a post cut-over dashboard to help our customers for assistance.

By 2025, cloud-native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives - up from less than 40% in 2021, states Gartner.

By hosting new-age CCM solutions on cloud, brands can capture customer insights efficiently to deliver contextual customer experience across multiple touchpoints and devices, thereby delivering impeccable customer experience and multi-experience. With cloud migration, legacy systems can be transformed, which will enable brands to deliver top notch customer communications at scale, improving business experience. Finally, cloud native applications can be accessed anytime anywhere from any device, this improves employee experience by fostering collaboration between multiple teams and departments. Espire is assisting leading brands across sectors and industries leverage cloud and hybrid cloud solutions to drive Total Experience at scale.

To know more about our service offerings, visit > https:// www.espire.com/services/cloud-devops or get in touch at marketing@espire.com.