Teams Work Better With a Modern Phone System

While there are companies that still prefer on-premises phone systems, many are choosing to adopt cloud-based solutions. In our experience, we’ve found the cloud to be the most fitting approach in many cases because it’s cost-effective and can offer features that reduce the burden of having to manage a phone system, which is especially beneficial for smaller IT teams.

In fact, 59% of businesses now use Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) as their sole phone and collaboration platform for its flexibility, scalability, ability to move to an operational expense mode and faster access to new features such as artificial intelligence, one 2025 survey found.

At CDW, we have experience deploying solutions on-premises and in the cloud across different vendors, including Cisco, Zoom, Microsoft, RingCentral and many more.

For organizations that are interested in modernizing from a legacy, on-premises phone system to a cloud-based one, here’s what our team can offer so that your deployment doesn’t have to disrupt your daily operations.

First, we export configuration data from the existing on-premises systems, such as phone numbers, devices and users. Then, we work with the customer to clean up the data and map it to the new cloud-based solution.

Next, CDW configures the new cloud phone solution, creating user accounts and assigning phone numbers. During this process, we also create auto-attendants and call flows.

Not every business has wired all its facilities with Ethernet to support IP phones. Some organizations still have analog phone lines. For those that do, CDW installs new analog gateways that are compatible with the new phone system.

Legacy IP desk phones may not be compatible with the new cloud phone system. Most users in an organization will just use the phone app to make calls and check voicemail, but for those that still want desk phones, CDW will help find new, compatible IP phones.

Once you’re ready to go live, CDW will port phone numbers from the existing carrier to the new cloud platform. To reduce risk, CDW engineers test and validate the cloud configuration before cutting over to the new system. Once the numbers port over and the new system is live, we work with your IT team to validate that everything works as expected.

At CDW, we have built in-house tools that help us speed migrations and better manage our customers’ cloud-based phone systems. The comprehensive, feature-rich tools, which connect to each vendor’s application programming interfaces, can export and import configuration data and make global changes quickly. For example, if a customer asked for a change to caller ID, instead of manually making the changes (which would take hours), we use a custom-built tool and perform a bulk update in minutes.

Our tools also speed the data cleaning process before the migration. They can export the data from the existing on-premises system and detect data anomalies that must be fixed. Once the migration is complete, our in-house tools allow us to generate detailed documentation that provides insights into how everything is configured in the new system.