Industry research is building a compelling picture of a growing trend towards cloud-based services for enterprise communications. For example, Forrester recently stated that the demand for managed (premise-based) and cloud services is expected to grow at about twice the rate of the overall IT industry, reflecting a major shift towards this more cost-effective delivery option.
Why collaborate in the cloud?
At VOSS we are seeing similar trends. Enterprise companies are strongly considering (and selecting) hosted and managed services as a way of meeting their IT & telecommunications needs.
But what does this mean? Today, there are three possible UC&C deployment models:
- Private cloud: An on premise model - all collaboration hardware and software is installed and managed within the organization’s network
- Hybrid cloud: A hosted model - all collaboration hardware and software is provided by a third party, but can still be dedicated, or even owned, by the organization
- Public cloud: All UC&C hardware and software is accessed from the cloud, where cloud infrastructure is by definition shared and not dedicated to any one organization
Cloud collaboration offers additional advantages over traditional enterprise IT applications:
- Cloud enables cost advantages from infrastructure virtualization
- Fully featured collaboration is available “by the drink”, on a monthly service fee
- The expensive need for systems integration and operational support of these collaboration systems is now fully absorbed by the cloud vendor
- Cloud vendors have invested in state-of-the-art management systems that provide organizations the ability to remotely self-administer communication services for their users; improving service quality
Some organizations are still evaluating the benefits of cloud based collaboration services. The major barriers are:
- Cloud service level agreements are often not as high as those provided by other hosted providers
- Organizations have invested significant capital in their existing communications infrastructure and don’t want to “rip and replace” these systems
- Data security and access is always a concern. Who owns the organization’s data within a cloud system and can they gain access to this data if they chose to move to another supplier?
- Lock-in and barriers to exit can be high with a cloud vendor
- Lack of integration from the cloud to the organization’s enterprise applications (e.g. directory integration)
- Network continuity – most large companies insist on the ability for locations to have redundant local break-out for calls should the cloud network fail. Most cloud services cannot support this
- Not all cloud services have invested in the latest collaboratoin applications or the most advanced management systems.
