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In the final blog of our three-part series on your top cloud migration questions, we focus on answers to your questions related to migrating from MiVoice Office 250 to MiCloud Connect, how Mitel ensures cloud solution compliance, security and availability and interoperability with other vendors’ products and solutions.
Thanks to Joe Herde, Director of Product Marketing for Mitel MiCloud Connect, and Scott Brodie, a Mitel sales engineer, who provided the answers to these questions during a recent webinar on cloud migration.
Here are edited versions of their responses.
Why should I migrate from Mitel MiVoice Office 250 to MiCloud Connect?
When you migrate from MiVoice Office 250 to MiCloud Connect, you have the best of both worlds: The ability to retain all of your current features and functions, and the opportunity to unlock a whole new set of capabilities that will help your teams work more efficiently and effectively.
For example, you can continue using your Star application for call routing and auto attendant functionality because MiCloud Connect provides feature parity with the app. At the same time, you’ll be able to access more advanced functionality through your existing Mitel 6900 series phones than you can when you’re using MiVoice Office 250.
MiCloud Connect enables a more integrated and improved experience with your 6900 series phones than MiVoice Office 250 does in terms of softphone functionality, mobility and other features. When you transition to MiCloud Connect, you can also take advantage of key capabilities your 6900 series phones support, such as the ability to send emergency notifications to all phones at once and to display desktop alerts.
Does migrating to MiCloud Connect allow my business to maintain compliance with industry and corporate requirements for public safety, data security, privacy and system availability?
Yes. MiCloud Connect is designed from the ground up to provide the highest possible levels of industry compliance, data protection and system availability.
We’ll start with public safety. MiCloud Connect complies with RAY BAUM's Act, which mandates that 911 calls made from non-fixed-line phones must include “dispatchable location” data. Dispatchable location data includes a street address as well as additional information, such as a floor, suite, quadrant or room number that helps first responders quickly and easily locate callers within office buildings, hotels, apartment buildings and other large facilities.
Compliance with RAY BAUM's Act is extremely important for public safety when multitenant phone systems, apps and cellphones are used to call 911, and you’re going to be hearing a lot more about it in the near future. As of January 6, 2022, system vendors and telecom companies will be required to comply with RAY BAUM's Act, so we’re ahead of the curve from that perspective.
We’ve also built multiple layers of security and reliability into MiCloud Connect to ensure our customers in every industry can meet the most rigorous requirements.
MiCloud Connect is built on Google Cloud Platform, which provides some of the highest levels of data security and system availability in the industry. Google Cloud Platform is also certified as meeting Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) standards and Service Organization Control Type II (SOC 2) requirements to meet the needs of heavily regulated industries such as healthcare, government, education and finance.
It’s also important to know that MiCloud Connect runs in Tier 3 data centers, which provide redundant servers, storage, network links and other IT components. Each component has multiple independent sources of power and cooling so one source can take over from another if needed. Together, these built-in redundancies significantly increase reliability and decrease the risk your MiCloud Connect solution will become unavailable.
To support customers who are operating in mission-critical environments, we also offer dedicated network service options such as connectivity in the form of a software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) or a private MPLS link.
And finally, we’re constantly auditing the MiCloud Connect software to uncover any potential security vulnerabilities. If a vulnerability is detected, a patch is applied as soon as possible to mitigate the risk that data will be compromised or lost.
How is support for MiCloud Connect handled?
We take care of all software upgrades, and you have 24/7 access to a help desk with knowledgeable staff who can answer your questions and assist you with any problems. If it makes your life easier, we can even program a “Help” button on your phone so you can connect directly to the Mitel help desk, or to your Mitel partner if they’re looking after your support requirements.
If I migrate to MiCloud Connect, can I still use the technologies I’ve purchased from other vendors?
We get quite a few questions about interoperability between MiCloud Connect and other vendors’ products and solutions, so here’s a brief summary of the ones we’re asked about most often:
- Cisco, and other vendors’ VPN products: Technically, we don’t need to worry about VPN products. Our applications and our phones are secured using proprietary mechanisms, which means you can take a phone home, plug it in to your home router, and it will connect back into the cloud system in a secure and reliable way. The same is true for our applications, so there shouldn’t be any need for a VPN.
- Polycomm phones: There’s quite a bit of flexibility here. You can reuse your 5000, 6000, 7000 and 8000 series Polycomm phones with MiCloud Connect. You can also add analog telephone adaptors (ATAs) that provide additional functionality.
- Paging equipment: We use technology from Alogsystems to interoperate with paging systems and meet your paging requirements.
Get answers to additional questions
If you have questions about migrating to the cloud that we haven’t covered in our blog series, reach out to your Mitel partner. They’re always fully up-to-date on our latest advances and ready to help you start reaping the many benefits of Mitel cloud solutions for communications and collaboration.
If you missed the first two blogs in our series, you can find them here:
- Part 1: What cloud communications mean for your business and how it helps you future proof communications.
- Part 2: The specifics of handset migration, and how migration to the cloud affects your communications features, functions and configuration capabilities.
