Cloud Based PBX - The Way to Go?

PBX services used to be confined to physical hardware companies stored inside their offices. Hell, lots of PBX phone systems still work this way, operating locally to provide their users with the warm and fuzzy sense of controlling their communications technology.

PBX systems hardly represented the only communications technology focused around locally stored hardware. Many businesses physically hosted their own servers and their own storage within their own premises, once again taking advantage of a number of benefits only available when your technology sits just a couple doors down from your employee's workstations.

But these days all of that seems to be changing. At least, if you paid attention to technology marketing you'd believe it's all changing. From the outside it looks like locally stored hardware solutions are being replaced by remotely located solutions - servers, storage and PBX services running hardware half-way around the world. These remotely located solutions may not offer as much control as benefits of locally stored solutions, but they do make the tasks of infrastructure expansion, maintenance and troubleshooting someone else's problem.

Now we're seeing the whole concept of remotely hosted solution taken to the next level - the Cloud, a virtual shared space whose computational resources are spread out among all the clients and users signed on to a provider's services.

Yet, for all the marketing hoopla surrounding using the Cloud for enterprise purposes, especially for enterprise PBX purposes, businesses are actually migrating to these virtual platforms at a much, much, much lower rate than you might imagine.

There are a couple good reasons organizations feel skittish about jumping onto the Cloud bandwagon.

· Businesses don't know if Cloud services actually offer measurable benefit over their existing premise-based phone system.The question at hand is whether moving to new technology is going to yield a measurable result. In post-recession business climate, decisions to upgrade communications technology don't come lightly. Unless new technology is intended to enact a change in a way business is conducted or accommodate growth, businesses owners are wisely waiting to jump to the cloud until they determine whether remotely located shared PBX services will actually present a measurable improvement over more traditional solutions.

· Businesses with active interest in the Cloud communications must be convinced that jumping into a largely untested technology is a good idea. It's not necessarily that technology is untested. But for those switching from a premise-based phone system - this is a leap of faith giving a lot of control over communications to a trusted third party. Let's face it, in spite all the references, unless you actually have first-hand experience using any service, you can't form an opinion of how reliable it is. Migrating all of your organization's communication technology to a solution whose reliability and effectiveness remains unknown sounds unwise.

· Businesses don't know who should manage their Cloud services.A business considering Cloud migration has two management options at their disposal- either they can task their IT department to manage infrastructure hosted in the Cloud, or they can offload this function to service provider or a trusted 3rd party. Neither of these solutions may seem particularly appealing particularly if sensitive information is involved. After all IT giants such as Google, Microsoft, Apple and others run their own infrastructure and keep their voice and data close to chest.

· Businesses aren't sure if they can trust all of the VoIP service providers suddenly popping up within the field due to relatively low cost of entry.The Cloud computing and hosted PBX markets are relatively young. Yet despite their young age, it's obvious to any observer that Cloud computing represents a viable and profitable venue, making it difficult to distinguish between fly-by-night Cloud VoIP service providers and long term players.

Will Cloud dominate the future of business communications? We don't know that for fact. At the moment there seems to be too much marketing hype surrounding the whole issue. But one thing for sure: cloud-based VoIP is here to stay.

Sam Rozenfeld runs DLS Internet Services, a business VoIP service provider. He shares his thoughts and a service provider's prospective on how hosted VoIP is being adopted by business community. Go to www.TelephonyYourWay.com/blog to see more.

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