The point of widespread adoption

Vendor surveys suggest that communications-as-a-service is on the point of widespread adoption by UK businesses. Nevertheless how many IT departments actually trust the cloud to deliver secure and reliable mission-critical voice and data communications?

CaaS is in substance an outsourcing model for enterprise communications that can include voice over IP, instant messaging, collaboration and videoconferencing applications provided on a pay-as-you-go basis, which can represent better value for money than the end-user organisation buying, operating and maintaining communications systems themselves.

As so then as service delivery, the CaaS provider takes on responsibility for related hardware and software management, and ideally offers workable service level agreements guaranteeing network quality of service.

Survey conducted

A survey conducted by communications software and services specialist Interactive Intelligence published in November concludes that up to 64 per cent of UK businesses have either already deployed or are looking to deploy some element of their communications to the cloud.

"We have already seen many apps start to move towards the cloud – customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, HR apps and payroll when all is said and done on – and we are seeing a similar trend with cloud-based communications," said David Paulding, regional sales director for the UK, Middle East and Africa at Interactive Intelligence.

Research conducted by Forrester previously this year suggests adoption rates have been slim, with only three per cent of 2,247 CIOs, CTOs, and IT executives polled in the US and Europe saying they have deployed CaaS, even though interactive voice response research in contact centres had bucked that trend.

"There is more adoption of cloud-based applications [and SaaS], however the big difference between applications and infrastructure is network latency and the ability to deliver real-time connectivity cheaply over the internet. It works, yet some companies have taken a leap and gone with cloud infrastructure services and found reliability to be a big issue."

Payment card industry data security standards governing the storage of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) recordings discussing individuals' credit card details are a critical source of anxiety for many, nevertheless Paulding feels that nobody needs to fret about hackers being able to eavesdrop on VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls over the internet.

Most of Interactive Intelligence's customers to tell the truth plump for a combination of cloud-based telephony and local telephone connections to make sure they are not left without a working system should the network fail.

Currently, around 30 per cent of its clients use cloud-based communications services, and the company as well does a thriving business in providing organisations with on-premise communications platforms, often for those that have been leasing equipment over a period of time.

In order to deliver the reliability that most corporates want from hosted communications services or CaaS, now, private, dedicated networks using resilient technologies just as multi-protocol label switching are required, and that costs money, which calls the whole value proposition into question.

Exclusive Computing survey highlights what cloud computing providers must do to persuade clients that their data is safe

This event is aimed at IT directors, e-business managers, heads of e-commerce, software providers and digital strategy directors