July 14, 2023
The way we live our lives has changed in so many ways over the past ten years due to cloud based services, many of which we now take for granted as the norm. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Uber and the list goes on and on.
We hardly ever raise our hands to hail a cab, we no longer rush into town to secure one of the limited number of box office films on DVD for that Saturday night rental, and our children now have a far less tangible experience when buying their first music album.
In the workplace the cloud also prevails, serving as a place to store and share our files, providing us with applications on demand and offering a multitude of different ways to communicate. Does anyone even have an on premise Exchange server for emails anymore? …
The last core business function clinging on to its physical on-premises roots is the telephone system and the Private Branch Exchange (PBX). Certainly most systems now in place are Internet Protocol (IP) based carrying voice over IP networks, but none the less a lot of equipment still needs to reside on site to support these systems, with costs associated to maintain and upgrade them in their struggle to keep pace with new ways of working and communicating.
We hardly ever raise our hands to hail a cab, we no longer rush into town to secure one of the limited number of box office films on DVD for that Saturday night rental, and our children now have a far less tangible experience when buying their first music album.
In the workplace the cloud also prevails, serving as a place to store and share our files, providing us with applications on demand and offering a multitude of different ways to communicate. Does anyone even have an on premise Exchange server for emails anymore? …
The last core business function clinging on to its physical on-premises roots is the telephone system and the Private Branch Exchange (PBX). Certainly most systems now in place are Internet Protocol (IP) based carrying voice over IP networks, but none the less a lot of equipment still needs to reside on site to support these systems, with costs associated to maintain and upgrade them in their struggle to keep pace with new ways of working and communicating.
Even if your PBX is functioning properly it is most likely decreasing your business efficiency and increasing your operational risk in several ways:
- With no providers investing in R&D for the good old on premise PBX it is leaving organisations at risk with many systems becoming obsolete and unsupported. Not only does this make it very costly to maintain but is also leaving many organisations with a hole in their continuity plan. Please see our previous article here – Avaya CS1000 PBX – The End Of A Long Journey
- By not using the latest cloud technologies organisations are losing out to their competition, both through the level of customer service experience they can deliver and in lacking a robust, flexible and mobile working environment offering employees a great work life balance. Even contact centre agents can be on call working from their sofa if desired.
- A cloud PBX delivers a maximum amount of resilience in your communications platform, there is no physical tie to hardware and you can work over both private & public connectivity internet and mobile 3/4G data connections. A new cloud platform if configured correctly should never leave you without a system, we do not call this Disaster Recovery because there should never be a disaster, your continuity plan will mean that calls can auto divert to other sites, mobile devices or be forwarded in many other ways.
- The announcement from BT regarding the removal of ISDN and PSTN support in the near future is also a sure sign that on premise solutions are nearing an end. Please see our previous article– Are You Prepared For The BIG Telephony Switch Off.
If you are still working with a legacy PBX then now is the time to evaluate the move to a hosted cloud PBX system. See how easy this is with our previous article,The Transition To Cloud Telephony – Easier Than You Think.
Today’s best-in-class cloud PBX solutions are not just about phone calls. They are focused on supporting a modern mobile workforce as well as a highly collaborative culture. Empowering your staff to work the way they want using their preferred devices is so much easier with a flexible cloud system.
Many of us are guilty of using a wide range of external applications to conduct business communications, both with internal and external contacts. Likely options include Skype, WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS …… the list goes on. The problem here is that information and communications become scattered, retrieval of important messages and attachments becomes challenging and security of company confidential information and audit trails are compromised.
Cloud PBX solutions from the current leading vendors should offer an all-in-one platform for collaboration and communication, surpassing the capabilities of the instant messaging examples mentioned above. The user interface should have a common presentation on every platform, a ‘single-click’ interface to reach anyone and require limited or no training to operate. An acronym you may have heard to describe hosted solutions that consolidate business communications is UC or UCaaS which means ‘Unified Communications as-a-Service’.
The flexibility of the hosted PBX model also means that integrations can be implemented quickly and easily to couple your phone system with enterprise applications in new and effective ways. This can range from basic ‘click-to-dial’ functionality to full CRM integration and advanced contact centre solutions. The full power of a cloud PBX can be harnessed through the business analytics and artificial intelligence functions that it can also provide.
The feature rich capabilities of the latest cloud PBX systems can support business operations in many ways. The financial services industry is one such example where new regulations regarding call recording introduced in 2018 can be far more easily accommodated within a cloud hosted system than an on-premises solution requiring local data storage with all the challenges regarding backup and archive. If call recording is also important for your industry please check our earlier article on meeting the requirements of MiFID II in the financial sector.
If the move to a cloud PBX is not on your roadmap now we believe that it will be soon in order for you to remain competitive with your industry peers. In fact predications suggest that by 2021, 90% of IT leaders will not purchase new premise-based UC infrastructure – up from 50% today – because future cloud UC offerings will be far ahead in terms of features, functions, portals, analytics and dashboards. [1].
The cloud PBX market is constantly evolving with new possibilities and integrations being added daily. The team here at ECaaS work closely with, and keep pace of the functionality from state-of-the-art cloud PBX providers so we can advise you on the best solution to meet your business needs.
[1] Gartner, Inc., ‘Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, Worldwide’, Daniel O’Connell, Megan Fernandez, Rafael Benitez, Bjarne Munch, Christopher Trueman, Mihai Nguyen, October 10, 2018.
Many of us are guilty of using a wide range of external applications to conduct business communications, both with internal and external contacts. Likely options include Skype, WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS …… the list goes on. The problem here is that information and communications become scattered, retrieval of important messages and attachments becomes challenging and security of company confidential information and audit trails are compromised.
Cloud PBX solutions from the current leading vendors should offer an all-in-one platform for collaboration and communication, surpassing the capabilities of the instant messaging examples mentioned above. The user interface should have a common presentation on every platform, a ‘single-click’ interface to reach anyone and require limited or no training to operate. An acronym you may have heard to describe hosted solutions that consolidate business communications is UC or UCaaS which means ‘Unified Communications as-a-Service’.
The flexibility of the hosted PBX model also means that integrations can be implemented quickly and easily to couple your phone system with enterprise applications in new and effective ways. This can range from basic ‘click-to-dial’ functionality to full CRM integration and advanced contact centre solutions. The full power of a cloud PBX can be harnessed through the business analytics and artificial intelligence functions that it can also provide.
The feature rich capabilities of the latest cloud PBX systems can support business operations in many ways. The financial services industry is one such example where new regulations regarding call recording introduced in 2018 can be far more easily accommodated within a cloud hosted system than an on-premises solution requiring local data storage with all the challenges regarding backup and archive. If call recording is also important for your industry please check our earlier article on meeting the requirements of MiFID II in the financial sector.
If the move to a cloud PBX is not on your roadmap now we believe that it will be soon in order for you to remain competitive with your industry peers. In fact predications suggest that by 2021, 90% of IT leaders will not purchase new premise-based UC infrastructure – up from 50% today – because future cloud UC offerings will be far ahead in terms of features, functions, portals, analytics and dashboards. [1].
The cloud PBX market is constantly evolving with new possibilities and integrations being added daily. The team here at ECaaS work closely with, and keep pace of the functionality from state-of-the-art cloud PBX providers so we can advise you on the best solution to meet your business needs.
[1] Gartner, Inc., ‘Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, Worldwide’, Daniel O’Connell, Megan Fernandez, Rafael Benitez, Bjarne Munch, Christopher Trueman, Mihai Nguyen, October 10, 2018.