If you’re implementing Unified Communications, you can likely attest that it’s a great communications facilitation tool. But the cloud has opened new opportunities to merge communications networks with critical data needs by providing Unified Communications as a Service, or UCaaS. With UCaaS, dial tone, data, conferencing, and a host of additional features and applications can be delivered directly to your business, and all managed from the cloud. Ideally, all departments and levels in a corporation should interact with one another to collaborate toward a common goal. UCaaS helps make this possible.
UCaaS, provides a unified, centralized location for multiple communications mediums such as email, VoIP, mobile phones, office phones and home phones. In deploying UCaaS, you eliminate your business’ need to purchase and maintain on-premise servers and equipment for communications, resulting in significant up-front cost savings. UCaaS not only increases employee productivity, but can also save your organization thousands on capital costs. This Accenture report cites research from Gartner stating that by 2014, the cloud-based market will be worth $55 billion annually. Do you think your business can benefit from deploying UCaaS? We do, read on to find out why.
Increased availability and efficiency of IT staff
When you deploy UCaaS, you consolidate your communications systems, which helps leverage the abilities of your IT staff to focus on other business issues. For example, UC as a Service automatically includes updates new features that are released. What does this mean for your IT team? It means there is no longer a need for their time to be tied up dealing with testing, scheduling and installing new software updates There is also no need to budget, purchase, and install hardware upgrades, so critical IT resources can be dedicated to other projects that help your business run faster, jump higher, and be more competitive in the market.
You are also likely to have staff that rely heavily on mobility and remain accessible through their mobile phones, softphones, or other wireless devices when out of the office. UC helps employees remain productive even when they are not in the office. Now that UC capabilities are delivered through the cloud, mobile workers can check the availability of resources in the office with a UC client on their mobile device. Knowing that status information is updated automatically, whether they’re on the phone, in a meeting, or on vacation, allows everyone to remain productive– even when they’re away.
Scales to fit your business
With UCaaS, you are putting the service to work for you, meaning you only pay for what you need. Since you’re paying for services on a per user/per month basis, you won’t be wasting resources on unused capacity. So what happens if the size of your business changes? No problem. If your business is growing, many UCaaS providers give you the flexibility to add more seats to accommodate growth. What about the flexibility to decrease if needed? Should it become necessary to reduce staff, you shouldn’t be stuck in a long term contract, and with UCaaS, you’re not. You can reduce your users on a per month/per user basis. You can gain from the elasticity of utilizing the cloud model – a major benefit of UC as a Service.
Increased Reliability
With the right design, UCaaS can offer higher levels of resiliency and redundancy than you will find with a typical on-premises system cost effectively. There are different designs to fit your business needs. For example, your data can be instantly backed up and replicated in multiple data centers for disaster-proof business communications. Be sure to select a UCaaS provider whose data center not only meets the highest requirements for physical security, but can also be monitored 24×7, offers the latest encryption and security protocols available and undergoes constant scrutiny to protect your company’s data from intrusion and security violations.
With UCaaS, Disaster Recovery applications are also an option for your communications and data. With these applications, you can choose delivery methods including: public, hybrid or private cloud models. For the highest level of redundancy you could even choose to have a 100% redundant, on-site backup of your entire communications platform, ensuring no downtime in the unlikely event of an emergency. The level of redundancy is up to you, but the increased reliability of UCaaS provides rock-solid design at a fraction of the cost you’d incur if you built it on your own.
You’ve likely assessed the impact moving to the cloud will have on your organization. We hope this has helped you take another step toward preparing for that change to allow your business to work faster, collaborate faster and communicate faster with UCaaS.
For additional stats and benefits of cloud communications download the infographic.
