A recent Frost & Sullivan survey of almost 2,000 global IT and telecom decision makers found that 59% have moved all of their video and web conferencing to the cloud and that 61% have moved part. These impressive numbers are certain to keep growing, and it got me thinking: “Why aren’t all organizations using cloud communications?” To learn the answers, I have been speaking with fellow CIOs to find out if their organizations are using a cloud communications solution and, if they aren’t, why not? Through these conversations, I discovered there are a number of myths and misperceptions about video communications in the cloud, and some specifically about Zoom, so this article is an effort to dispel them.

Myth: Migration is time-consuming and difficult.

Reality: CIOs that have overseen tough migrations in the past may understandably be concerned about moving users to a new, cloud-based video communications platform. However, unlike many vendors that provide a cookie-cutter approach to customer migrations, Zoom employs a hands-on, long-term, consultative approach that takes the guesswork out of enterprise onboarding. For example, we know that sales will use Zoom very differently than engineering will, and therefore customize our training accordingly. We also know that successful migration—no matter how large or small the organization–is aided by having one or more internal sponsors to prepare employees for the change. We work closely with those sponsors, advising them and providing internal communications templates that explain why the migration is occurring, what to expect, and how the organization will benefit. When internal sponsors are engaged in migrations, we regularly see Fortune 100 customers and other organizations with hundreds of thousands of users fully migrating to Zoom in less than a month. What’s more, customer satisfaction rates typically soar following migration. For example, following migration to Zoom, a Fortune 10 customer went from an overall meeting and collaboration satisfaction score of about 80% to 96% in just 3 months. Of course, Zoom does not consider migration to be a finite event; we continually check in with customers following migration to ensure that any new issues are proactively addressed, and even provide them with information to help demonstrate return on investment—what CIO wouldn’t love that? All in all, this contributes to our industry-leading net promoter score of 71.

Myth: Interoperability is complex.

Reality: Many CIOs are of the opinion that interoperability is synonymous with complexity. The truth is that Zoom plays well with everyone—as our clients likes to say, “It just works.” Our Conference Room Connector seamlessly interoperates with all endpoints without any friction. This enables organizations to preserve existing investments including those from Polycom, Cisco, or Lifesize. The same holds true with any investments they have made in conference room peripherals such as USB-based cameras and microphones. Zoom is designed to help organizations preserve their hardware investment as long as it works for them. We are software at our core and engineers in our hearts, and our mission is to provide a hardware agnostic, seamless video communications and collaboration experience. Over time, as hardware ages, room profiles and needs change, and even more innovation occurs, organizations can fully migrate to a cloud-based room solution, such as Zoom Rooms.

Myth: Cloud communications needs better security.

Reality: Despite opinions to the contrary, there is ample evidence to show that security in the cloud is quite robust. In fact, there is strong concurrence that the security posture you can achieve by leveraging a major cloud platform provides a much greater level of protection than is available with on-premise options. However, organizations do need to recognize that the simple act of migrating to the cloud, or in this case, cloud communications, does not, in and of itself, enhance or guarantee security. Please check out Zoom’s security page if you want to know how we protect our customers and their data.

Myth: You cannot have too many communications solutions.

Reality: I have heard fellow CIOs describe organizations that deploy six or even seven different communications solutions across the enterprise. They believe that letting their lines of business choose different tools for different types of video communications—one for webinar, one for employee training, one for conference rooms, another for sales calls—is what they need to do to keep their users happy. That’s not our philosophy at Zoom. Instead, we believe having a single platform that meets all communications needs is the best way to go. A single platform reduces complexity and increases user adoption by providing the same experience irrespective of the use case, whether its a webinar, meeting, conference room, or other use case. A consistent platform irrespective of operating system (Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS, or Linux) is also a major benefit and increases the user adoption. Furthermore, having several systems significantly increases the resources required for support, integration, administration, maintenance, and training compared to those needed for a single platform. When the single platform meets—and in many cases exceeds—the functionality of several standalone solutions, the choice speaks for itself.

Myth: I need more scale than the cloud can provide.

Reality: To the contrary, the cloud is attracting hundreds of thousands of organizations precisely because of its ability to horizontally scale. Since Zoom is built from the ground up for the cloud, it is ideally suited to scaling and large organizations comprise a big portion of Zoom’s customer base—in fact, 58% of the Fortune 500 use Zoom. In particular, one Fortune 100 technology company uses Zoom as its video communications platform, supporting 25,000 users in its product organization with almost 29 million meeting minutes a month at a 98% active usage rate. This year, Zoom is will support well over 40 billion meeting minutes across 13 data centers around the world. Simply put, scale is not an issue—the Zoom platform is built for horizontal scaling.

Have you heard any other myths or misperceptions about cloud communications? If so, I would love to hear them. You can reach me at [email protected].