Is it Time to Move from Your Premise to the Cloud?

Small business VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and UC have by and large been installed on premises. Nevertheless according to Steve Taylor, president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials, and Jim Metzler, vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates, "it's probably time to consider a adding this to your cloud strategy."

Taylor and Metzler cite "2011 Sourcebook for VoIP and UC Services," produced as a joint effort of Delphi and Webtorials, as recommending that "moving to a cloud or hosted offering for communications is the then and there big thing for CIOs to consider."

"There are cloud/hosted IP Telephony, Unified Messaging, call center and Unified Communications services," Taylor and Metzler say, noting that these services can as well support backup and recovery for remote offices and, in their words, "deliver business continuity at a lower cost."

The two industry pros see the value of CaaS

The two industry pros see the value of CaaS, or hosted communications, in that the enterprise accesses the services through the Internet in the overwhelming majority of instances. This means you don’t need to buy a lot of hardware -- even though in reality, clearly, as they note, you’re going to be splashing out some cash for endpoints, like IP phones, and some internal network to access the services or software.

In March TMC’s Linda Dobel wrote that the benefit of CaaS that receives the most buzz is cost control. With CaaS you will have a fixed, predetermined monthly cost for communications. Gone will be the days of budget wrangling over the costs for using, maintaining and repairing, as so then as upgrading, on-premise tools. With the service model of communications, all of these items will be taken care of by a third party at a fixed cost.