CLOUD UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS AS A SERVICE (UCaaS) BUILT FOR THE ENTERPRISE
The combination of mobile devices and cloud-based solutions is the biggest change to impact the overall Unified Communications (UC) market. UC solutions in the future will no longer be developed from one specific device such as laptop and will need to offer rich experiences across any device.
Reasons businesses shifting to hosted cloud-based UC models
Primary reasons business adopting to hosted cloud-based UC models include:
- Cost Advantages - Capex to Opex - economic conditions in recent years have placed additional pressure on organisations to minimise costs. As such, organisations are looking for flexible payment models. Hosted cloud-based models offer a choice of subcription models ranging from monthly to per user or device, allowing organisations to adjust to cost pressure and economic conditions.
- Reduced Maintenance Overheads - Besides the upfront cost of purchasing the necessary hardware and licenses, on-going maintenance and support is also vital for overall cost of ownership. Furthermore, organisations need to maintain a sizable internal IT team to provide necessary level of service. Cloud-based model enable organisations to hand over maintenance of UC infrastructures to service providers. Hence, organisations benefited not only from simplified infrastructure but also minimised internal IT overheads.
- Business Agility and Speed to Market - the on-demand model of cloud solutions allows organisations to quickly scale into any market demands leveraging existing hosted cloud-based UC infrastructures and networks avoiding time consuming and complex process of licensing. This allow organisations to create competitive advantage by rapidly adapt to changes in market conditions.
- Ease of Upgrade to Latest Versions - the cloud service provider is responsible in ensuring applications are updated to the latest version, enabling organisations to benefit from the latest features without paying any additional costs.
- Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) capabilities - public cloud infrastructure is highly resilient with vendors building multiple layers of redundancy and DR capabilities across software, hardware and telecommunications. In addition, BCP and DR capabilities are available as built-in features for some UCaaS solutions without additional costs.
The following should be the criteria organisations should use when selecting a cloud service provider for their UC requirement:
- Security and data migration - organisations are looking for cloud service provider that have extensive experience in adhering to regulatory requirement.
- Cost and ROI benefits - the ability to reduce upfront investment and realise faster return on investment will be the main driving factor organisations evaluating cloud-based solutions.
- Breadth of UC solutions and support services - cloud service provider that can offer a range of UC solutions such as telephony, conferencing (audio, video and web) and collaboration will be better placed to address wider market.
- Value added services - specialised services such as consulting services can offer migration services from on-premise to cloud solutions especially when organisations are concerned about the impact of their data and databases when migrating from on-premise to cloud-based model.In terms of UC solutions, cloud service provider can provide valuable guidance in selecting UC vendors that will be most effective given the organisations' existing infrastructure and future technology roadmaps.
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