If you feel like you and your IT colleagues spent the past two-plus years barely keeping up or deploying systems and processes in a way that was just "good enough" to get through the disruption — you're not alone.
That was my biggest takeaway from a just-released survey conducted earlier this year by market research firm Dimensional Research for Workspot, a vendor offering cloud-based desktop services. The survey asked for agreement or disagreement with the statement: "We did the minimum necessary to support remote workers when the pandemic started, and now we're having to go back and do it the right way." Among enterprises with 5,000 or more employees, 51% agreed, while for those with 1,000- 5,000 employees, 47% agreed.
Those statistics may offer some context for a couple of recent articles on No Jitter: Are On-Prem Phone Systems Actually Dead? by consultant Melissa Swartz of Swartz Consulting; and The Death of POTS? Not Quite, Here's Why by Denise Munro of CRG consultancy. Each of these posts deals with legacy technologies that are, unquestionably, on their way out — slowly. The way legacy technologies always go.
Dealing with legacy technologies was not the highest priority during the pandemic. Providing for a remote workforce and quickly meeting digital transformation needs had to take precedence. But that legacy gear didn't go away, and it still has to be dealt with.
In her post, Swartz notes that despite the overwhelming momentum away from premises and toward UCaaS and CCaaS, the decision is not an automatic one for some enterprises: "The cloud vs. on-premises decision is at the foundation of finding the right communication technology for each organization," she writes. "In some cases, the decision is obvious. But many of my clients give this choice careful consideration and arrive at different decisions — it's definitely not a case of one size fits all."
I'd argue that not rushing into a cloud decision, but instead at least doing due diligence, is part of what many enterprises would consider "do[ing] it the right way," in the words of the Dimensional Research survey.
