The conversation about cloud is evolving. While emergency services have traditionally been cautious about cloud for mission-critical operations, many agencies are now exploring how to leverage cloud capabilities strategically rather than whether to consider it at all. How do you migrate decades of on-premises infrastructure to hybrid cloud models without risking the communications reliability your community depends on?
Your current Private Branch Exchange (PBX) and contact centre systems have served you well, reliably handling thousands of emergency calls. However, as technology evolves and vendor strategies shift, you’re exploring how hybrid cloud models might offer enhanced capabilities while maintaining the operational reliability your community depends on.
Let’s map out a practical migration approach that acknowledges both the operational imperative to modernise and your zero-tolerance policy for disruption to emergency services.
Why Hybrid Instead of Pure Cloud or Pure On-Premises
Before diving into migration mechanics, understand why hybrid cloud makes sense specifically for emergency services. Pure cloud solutions offer flexibility and potentially lower operational costs, but they introduce dependencies on internet connectivity and external providers that make many emergency services leaders uncomfortable. Your community’s ability to reach 000 shouldn’t depend entirely on your internet connection staying up.
Pure on-premises infrastructure gives you maximum control but increasingly limits your technology options. Vendors are focusing development resources on cloud platforms. Modern capabilities like Advanced Mobile Location (AML) integration, artificial intelligence-enhanced call routing, and sophisticated analytics often arrive first, or only, in cloud offerings.
Hybrid models give you flexibility: critical call handling stays on-premises where you control it, while cloud provides surge capacity and disaster recovery. You’re not choosing between cloud or on-premises; you’re using both where each makes the most sense.
Phase One: Assessment and Architecture Design
Your migration starts well before any technology changes. Begin with honest assessment of your current state. Document exactly what your infrastructure does today: call volumes and patterns, integration points with Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) and Integrated Communications Control System (ICCS) platforms, geographic redundancy arrangements, accessibility features like 106/TTY support, and regulatory compliance requirements.
Next, identify what must remain on-premises versus what could move to cloud. Core Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) telephony typically stays on-premises or in private cloud infrastructure. Contact centre overflow capacity, management and reporting systems, call recording archives, and training environments might be excellent cloud candidates. There’s no universal answer, your operational requirements and risk tolerance drive these decisions.
Design your target architecture with clear separation between cloud and on-premises components. Which systems hold sensitive operational data? Where does real-time processing happen versus batch analytics? How does data flow between environments? Your architecture should explicitly address these questions before you start building anything.
Critically, this planning phase must include your stakeholders beyond IT. Your operations managers need to understand how hybrid architecture affects their daily workflows. Your executive leadership needs confidence that reliability won’t be compromised. Your compliance officers need assurance that regulatory requirements remain met. Address concerns during planning, not during implementation.
Phase Two: Establish Your Cloud Foundation
Before migrating any production systems, build and validate your cloud infrastructure foundations. This includes network connectivity between your on-premises facilities and cloud environments, security controls, identity and access management, and monitoring systems.
Network connectivity deserves particular attention. You need sufficient bandwidth, low latency, and redundant pathways between on-premises and cloud. If your hybrid architecture depends on real-time communication between components in different environments, network performance directly affects system reliability.
Security architecture often creates friction in hybrid deployments. Your on-premises systems operate behind established security perimeters. Cloud components need equivalent security while remaining accessible for their intended purposes. Work through these security requirements thoroughly before connecting production systems. Discovering security gaps during migration creates delays and risk.
Testing and validation at this stage means actually running non-production workloads in your cloud environment. Deploy test systems, generate realistic load, verify monitoring and alerting work correctly, and practice your operational procedures. This foundation work feels slow, but it prevents much bigger problems later.
Phase Three: Pilot with Non-Critical Systems
Your first production migration should be something important enough to matter but not so critical that problems create operational crises. Management reporting systems, training environments, or administrative communications platforms make good pilots.
Successful pilot migrations teach your team how hybrid operations actually work. How do you provision new cloud resources? What’s the process for making configuration changes? How does troubleshooting work when problems span on-premises and cloud components? You want these lessons learned on systems where mistakes create inconvenience, not emergencies.
Document everything during your pilot. What worked well? What created unexpected challenges? How did your staff respond to hybrid management responsibilities? These insights shape your approach to migrating more critical systems later.
Pilot migrations also validate your architecture decisions. If performance, security, or operational issues emerge, address them before expanding cloud adoption. Treating pilots as learning exercises rather than proof-of-concept demonstrations helps identify and fix problems early.
Phase Four: Migration Execution with Parallel Running
When you’re ready to migrate mission-critical components, parallel running becomes essential. Your old and new systems operate simultaneously, with traffic gradually shifting from old to new as confidence builds.
For emergency services, this often means new infrastructure handling small percentages of call volume initially, with automatic fallback to legacy systems if problems occur. As the new system proves reliable, you increase its traffic share until eventually it becomes primary and legacy systems provide backup.
This gradual transition requires infrastructure that supports traffic splitting and dynamic failover. Your telephony routing needs to handle percentage-based load distribution. Your CAD integration must work with both old and new communications platforms during transition. Your operational dashboards should show performance metrics across both environments so you can make informed decisions about increasing migration pace.
Time periods for parallel running vary dramatically based on system complexity and your risk tolerance. Some agencies maintain parallel environments for weeks or months. Others transition more rapidly. Let operational reality and observed performance guide your timeline rather than arbitrary project deadlines.
Phase Five: Validation and Optimisation
Migration completion isn’t when you turn off old systems, it’s when new systems prove they meet or exceed previous operational performance. This validation period requires rigorous monitoring of key metrics: call answer times, system availability, CAD integration reliability, and user satisfaction from call-takers and dispatchers.
Compare these metrics against your baseline from pre-migration operations. Are you actually achieving the improvements that justified this project? If not, why not, and what optimisation is needed?
Hybrid cloud often enables capabilities that weren’t possible in pure on-premises environments. Are you leveraging them? Cloud-based analytics might provide operational insights you couldn’t previously obtain. Elastic capacity might let you handle surge loads better than legacy infrastructure. These benefits should materialise during your validation period, not remain theoretical future possibilities.
Optimisation also means right-sizing your cloud resource consumption. Cloud’s flexibility is valuable, but unmanaged cloud spending quickly exceeds expectations. Establish cost monitoring and optimisation practices during validation before spending patterns become entrenched.
The Ongoing Hybrid Operation Reality
Hybrid cloud is an operating model that requires ongoing attention. You’re managing infrastructure across multiple environments, with different operational characteristics and cost structures. This requires different skills, tools, and processes than pure on-premises operations.
Invest in training your team for hybrid operations. Ensure they understand both environments and how they interact. Build operational procedures that account for hybrid complexity. Establish clear responsibilities for managing cloud versus on-premises components.
Your migration roadmap doesn’t end with technical implementation. It extends into establishing sustainable hybrid operations that support your mission for years ahead.
Planning your migration to hybrid cloud infrastructure? Connect with specialists who understand the unique reliability requirements and operational constraints of emergency services communications.
