Welcome to our Cloud Migration Best Practices series. Having owned and operated a nationwide all-IP voice network for more than a decade, we’ve seen a lot of our customers migrate their telephony from on-prem to the cloud. Since customer service and co-creation is part of who we are at Bandwidth, we’ve been in the trenches with our customers, and felt their pain as they’ve migrated. In this series, we’ll outline the biggest migration challenges we’ve seen over and over, and share what companies like yours can do to proactively avoid them. The first up to bat is a big one: porting.
When you migrate your telephony to the cloud via a unified communications (UCaaS), conferencing, or contact center (CCaaS) solution, you’re given the option to access the PSTN in one of two ways:
- Use embedded calling plans that the cloud app provides, or
- Bring your own carrier (with dedicated SIP trunks).
If you choose Option 1 and want to keep your numbers, you have to port them to the cloud app provider. This is a common enough practice, but consistently raises three major pain points. Here’s what they are, why they happen, and how you can avoid them.