EAH Housing develops low-income housing, manages over 100 properties in California and Hawaii, and plays a leadership role in local, regional, and national housing advocacy efforts. The organization serves more than 20,000 families, students, people with disabilities, seniors, veterans, and the formerly homeless.
Jiano Ma, EAH Housing Vice President IT, has been moving the organization toward an all-cloud IT environment since 2013 when he migrated to Office 365. “I’m proud to say that today everything we have is cloud-based. There is zero on-prem,” Ma says.
That includes the phone system, which Ma included in his cloud initiative because the piecemeal system he found when he arrived at EAH Housing was not serving the organization well. Different offices had different phone service providers and different equipment, so there was no centralization. Many of the on-prem PBX systems were so basic that they didn’t include voicemail. “We missed a lot of business opportunities as well as customer service calls,” Ma recalls.
Another drawback to the on-premises system was that it was not transparent. “It was always a hidden box for everyone, even admins and IT,” Ma says.