It is difficult to imagine how Cecil Lawson gets any sleep. He wears many hats as an educator and entrepreneur while also running IT for the City of Campbell, California. Serving the public interest is a big part of his career working for both the U.S. federal government and many municipalities. In addition to teaching, he has been involved in top-secret defense projects and overhauling the San Jose, California police department’s criminal information systems. He has participated in two startups and advised more than 30 others.

A key part of his role with the city is to manage the IT hardware and networking infrastructure teams. He led the city’s transformation from using legacy on-premises telephony to implementing a modern, cloud-based platform that can better meet the city's needs.

With his background and accomplishments, I thought he would be a great person to share his thoughts about the state of cloud versus on-premises communications including why or why not public sector institutions and businesses are moving their telecommunications to the cloud.

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Cecil Lawson manages IT for the City of Campbell, California

An Evolution Accelerated

“The Internet used to be a fun, cool thing,” Lawson says. “Now it is a mission-critical thing.”

While the pandemic accelerated cloud adoption, IT leaders, especially in the public sector, are continuously looking to improve operational efficiency, Lawson says.

“We cut our teeth through this pandemic as something more than a reactive organization that keeps the lights on. We’ve shown we can deploy and apply these new technologies to be strategic about investing taxpayer funds to help our community adapt to the new normal.”

Cloud Cost Benefits

Cost benefits, Lawson says, can be as compelling as technological ones. Purchasing on-premises telephony solutions today often requires “capital-rich investments requiring me to cobble together a big pot of funds,” whereas cloud investments allow him to “pay over time and build payments into my daily, monthly, quarterly, and yearly operations. You can just move to the cloud to realize its value immediately without having to break the bank.” Additionally, adopting cloud security posture management as part of the cloud migration strategy ensures continuous monitoring and compliance, which justifies the shift from capital-heavy on-premises solutions.

Lawson says, “Some on-prem projects are difficult to do nowadays because in many cases if a project costs $30 million over five years, you have to either have the $30 million now or allocated to proceed. Cloud works differently. The more you wait, the more expensive the migration can be because the older tech gets, the more expensive it gets to operate and maintain.

Selling Cloud to the City Council

“We cut our teeth through this pandemic as something more than a reactive organization that keeps the lights on. We’ve shown we can deploy and apply these new technologies to be strategic about investing taxpayer funds to help our community adapt to the new normal.”

Lawson said technology advances have forced his hand to upgrade to the cloud. “I couldn't connect easily to a website or new APIs. We were missing out on value.” Still, Lawson had to make a business case to the city council. He focused his argument on saving money and being able to benefit from new innovations designed for the latest cloud applications.

More specifically, Lawson argued that a modern, cloud telephony system would reduce staffing costs for expensive IT engineers because new cloud services have self-service capabilities to make it easy for regular users to make changes or fix issues. It turns out, he was correct for his city. Lawson says that the percentage of an IT engineer’s time to manage their phone system dropped from one-third to between five and ten percent after moving away from their legacy on-premises system. That translates to real savings because you can reallocate an IT engineer’s time to other projects.

Campbell’s on-premises system, like that of many of its peers, had older equipment. “It was easy to see that maintenance costs were escalating quickly as our hardware and software got older. Even if we continued along that path, some parts would become more difficult to find. Vendors were gravitating offerings toward cloud too. I felt that a new system would be more efficient with a lower total operating cost than keeping with the old way of doing things.”

Beyond cost, Lawson argued that city employees should benefit from “the march of technology.” This includes being able to work from anywhere with access to their work phone number and collaboration tools from any home computer or mobile device. The more productive technology could keep employees, the more benefits citizens and local businesses could realize during a time of unprecedented change.

On Cloud Security

Organizations consistently rate security as a top consideration when selecting a phone system. While there are different viewpoints about on-premises versus cloud security, Lawson says the cloud “reduces risk vectors, which make the security actually better.”

He says better security starts with your RFPs. Investigate the data centers your prospective vendor use. Make sure they have proper network and physical access controls and adhere to security standards, such as SOC2, that match your requirements.

Cloud allows you to concentrate your security efforts around endpoints. He suggests that if you use a multi-factor authentication service, the lack of strong passwords becomes one of your biggest security threats. You can offer employees training that educates them about passwords, phishing, and safe online behavior.

Will everyone eventually go cloud?

“Yeah, it's gonna have to go that way. Ultimately, there will be competitive pressure to move to the cloud. At some point, if I wanted an on-premises PBX, I may not be able to find it. And if I can, it is going to be very expensive. So why do I need it?

I would just hate for it to get to a point where there'd be an IT manager, director, or CIO, get caught with their pants down, so to speak, because they weren't paying attention to what was happening around them. And ultimately their hands will be forced because of the pure costs. Without the cloud, you’re not going to be able to integrate with all those cool systems that your customers want to use, simply because you have antiquated technology. Either costs or forced obsolescence will force you into a cloud at some point.”

Final Thoughts

Thanks to Cecil Lawson for taking the time to share his views. Read a City of Campbell case study about how Lawson and his team modernized telecommunications for local residents and businesses.