8 Reasons Why You Should Move Your Telephony To The Cloud

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In our previous article, The Transition to Cloud Telephony, we explained just how easy it is to move your communications to the cloud.

This month we are exploring 8 key reasons why this market is exploding, and because businesses of all sizes and across all industries, are switching to Cloud Telephony, the technology that is 'taking the market by storm'.

Removing the ties to ridged 'on-promise' hardware and 'fixed lines' is appealing to companies of all sizes from Sole Traders, to International Enterprise organizations.

Cloud Telephony offers a wide array of benefits and is able to deliver, and meets the varying needs and requirements demanded by all businesses, sectors and environments.

Business Continuity

Every business needs to secure continuity of services; downtime of any service is very cost for any size organization.

A hosted telephony platform gives you continuity of service 'as standard', enabling all users within the business to make and receive calls from anywhere, regardless of their location. This is done by giving every user four different ways of making and receiving office calls.

• Physical Desk Phone
• Soft Phone (on computer / laptop)
• Mobile App over 3G / 4G, Wifi (or potentially even Cellular dependent on the chosen hosted provider)
• Web Browser

This flexibility not only protects a business from potential failure of connectivity, but also, in the event employees can not get to the office, ie a snow day, staff can still make and receive business calls from home, while still presenting the office number . All key features such as reporting and call recording are still in place. Should employees be part of any ring groups or call routing, they will continue to receive inbound calls delivering the same service to clients no matter where their location.

As your business phone numbers are hosted in the cloud, and have no ties to physical locations, they are totally flexible. If you move location, your number simply moves with you; no risk of ever losing those all-important numbers.

Improved Control & Efficiency

Traditional on-promise solutions, were not easy to use or manage, meaning companies would be reliant on raising support tickets, even for the simplest of changes. Whereas a quality hosted solution will have a user-friendly interface, with a consistent look and feel across multiple devices, manageable from any device that connects to the internet, laptop, tablet or smart phone.

Users can have full control over their extension level call forwarding, but also system administrators are empowered to make changes to key features such as Auto Attendant, Ring Groups, and where numbers are pointing to.

In addition the system should be fully supported (at no extra cost) by the provider, giving you the choice, you should prefer someone else to initiate adds, moves & changes.

Being able to make these changes 'on the fly', without long lead times, and simply being able to easily change call routing or reset passwords quickly, means the right hosted PBX is far more efficient.

Forever Evolving

The great thing about having communications platform 'in the cloud' and provided 'as a service' , is that it will never become obsoleste, or lag behind the latest technology innovations. With the traditional way of purchasing a PBX, you will inevitably find that soon you have a system which is no longer up-to-date.

With a quality hosted solution you have peace of mind, being confident that you are future proofed, and that you will always have a cutting edge solution, with on-going development and the latest advances in technology. As and when new features are developed, they will be added to your system as part of the service.

Feature Rich as Standard

As standard, a hosted communications offering will be packed full of features within the standard license from your provider. This model is not about upgrade paths & additional licensing; if a feature has been developed as part of the product roadmap, it will simply be added to the PBX as standard.

Your chosen Enterprise Communications as a Service platform, should have, out-of-the-box, a full UC suite, video, presence, messaging and the ability to make and receive calls over multiple devices.

Some providers will even be able to deliver services over Cellular voice or PSTN.

Scalable and Adaptable

When purchasing any solution, it was historically imperative to consider what the business requirements would be in one, two or five years ahead. This was to ensure, that the investment was contained in volatile and scalable technology, to meet the challenge of the current and futures goals. These could often be hard to predict, resulting in very difficult decisions and despite demanding greater investment than necessary to try and anticipate the unknown. The concern with this would inevitably be, realizing that the investment you made is redundant and no longer fit for purpose.

With Cloud Technology, there is no longer the need to invest today for tomorrow. The solution you buy today, whether you are a sole trader or a global enterprise company, will be using the same platform. Modern systems are easily scalable to meet any growth you may anticipate, whether planned or unplanned, by simply adding in users, ring groups and auto attendants, as and when they join; being software based means there are no limits.

Physical ISDN / PSTN lines or having capacity with your physical PBX, no longer determines how many users and concurrent calls you can have, your concurrent calls are now restricted by the bandwidth available to you.

With leading hosted providers you should have the ability to choose the bandwidth requirement individually for each user, from 30kbps or at 90kpbs for HD quality, for each call. This gives you the ability to have different dependencies across different sites, and for home or remote workers. To have full HD quality you will only need 1mb allocated to voice for 10 concurrent calls.

BYOD or Flexible Working Policy

These two terms are now common in modern businesses. BYOD (bring your own device) is allowing staff to use their own devices for work, including laptops, tablets or phones.

Flexible working is a working arrangement, which gives a degree of flexibility on how long, where, when and at what times employees work.

A hosted communications platform can help with these policies. Having all your systems and telephone numbers securely in the cloud, makes delivering this a very simple process. The geographical location of an employee is no longer a problem, nor is the device they use.

There is no longer a need to be tied to a physical office; all calls can be made and received using an app on their laptop, smart phone, tablet or simply from a web browser.

Users are able to make a call from anywhere while displaying the office number, still benefiting from live analytics, reporting and call recording, if relevant.

No matter where, when or how your staff work you will be able to give them a full UC platform that is part of your core business system, working in exactly the same way as if they were in the office.

Should a member of staff leave the business, you can simply 'disable' their access from the control panel in an instant, eliminating their access across all devices.

Reduced Cost, Not Quality

The general rule is that you can not reduce costs without reducing quality. While this is generally true, it is not always the case with modern technology.

Hosted communications is revolutionizing the industry. The traditional way of generating revenue with upfront on-premise hardware, install and configuration, as well as ongoing lines and calls charges etc … is no longer the way forward. Cloud solutions typically provide FREE calls, while eliminating the need for multiple lines and hardware.

Removing the costs of expensive ISDN / PSTN's, mobile and landline calls, maintenance costs, SIP Trunks, IT overheads etc .. and delivering your communications platform at a fixed monthly cost is the future.

No Upfront Costs

Traditionally there were large upfront CAPEX costs for businesses to implement a new communications platform. However, by choosing the right hosted provider, the whole solution will be delivered 'as a service' with no upfront cost, including all hardware, training and installation.

Typically it's possible for a business to benefit from a new state of the art solution, while also saving on current ongoing costs.

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Source by David Vallance