As remote work becomes the new normal for many enterprises, collaboration is being tested like never before. And few feel the pressure more than enterprise IT leaders.

In addition to delivering performance and reliability, they need to envision how their organizations can use technology to achieve results remotely. They're searching for an ideal vision of a modern meeting and collaboration experience.

What does that look like? A hybrid cloud collaboration platform can provide an attractive answer. It's a highly scalable, easy-to-access solution that offers substantial benefits.

To help formulate your strategy, here are areas where hybrid cloud collaboration can help you capture more value and maximize results.

Collaboration modernization doesn't require ripping or replacing

Most enterprise organizations have sizable investments in collaboration technology or collaboration-adjacent solutions: endpoints, applications, PBX systems, and more.

As you seek to optimize your collaboration experience, remember that reshaping and reinvigorating your approach doesn't require you to do away with these existing investments.

The ideal collaboration experience is seamless

Enterprise organizations employ an average of seven different collaboration platforms, such as calendar, IM, email, meetings, file sharing, customer contact center, and so on.

To streamline the user experience, you need to centralize and consolidate tools. It should be a unified experience, not a disparate one. Consistency is key. As you simplify your strategy, you'll get stronger diagnostics and analytics, and reduce IT costs, too.

Remove friction from your user's workflow

How many clicks does it take your users to get from, say, an Excel spreadsheet to video-chatting with their project partner? It's an important number. There's no such thing as too few clicks.

So how do you reduce the number of clicks? Integration. Embedding collaboration in everyday work applications like Microsoft Office 365, Epic, or ServiceNow allows users to reach out to colleagues without shifting focus or losing their flow.

Elevate collaboration through cloud and AI/ML

Connecting collaboration to the cloud allows you to accomplish amazing things via artificial intelligence and machine learning.

With cloud capabilities, your platform can automatically create meeting rooms when new tickets enter a tool such as ServiceNow.  Provide AI-enabled occupant counting for video rooms. Allow for hands-free collaboration and meeting room scheduling. Automatically output action items from a meeting. Or seamlessly pull up additional context as topics are discussed.

The possibilities are virtually endless.

Ensure crystal-clear audio and video

The ideal modern meeting experience has reliably great call quality. Delivering consistently great performance starts on internal networks. Intelligent networking and policy-based automation help ensure better results.

You should be mindful of your collaboration vendor's infrastructure. Traffic flow between nodes within the provider cloud environment is also critical.

Start building your hybrid cloud collaboration experience

So how do you make your vision for ideal enterprise collaboration via hybrid cloud a reality?

Cisco Performance IT is a methodology that helps enterprise organizations conceive a centralized approach to collaboration-and builds a roadmap to take them there. It delivers increases in efficiency that cost-justify the investment in collaboration. These efficiencies can even enable the investment to pay for itself.

Performance IT can help you find ways to leverage your existing investments and maximize their value as your collaboration evolves.

For more details on optimizing existing collaboration investments as you move to a hybrid cloud approach, check out our Investment Optimization Handbook: Connecting On-Premises Collaboration to the Cloud.