Cloud Phone Systems

A cloud phone system, often referred to as Hosted PBX, is when your phone systems intelligence is located off premise. Thus, intelligent call routing and features are performed elsewhere. Clients simply purchase IP phones and power over Ethernet data switches (POE) for their environment. All phone routing is handled in a service providers' data center. Customers access the cloud data center over an internet connection.

When making the decision to switch to a Cloud Phone System, there are several different options:

Public Cloud Phone System: If you have looked into a cloud or hosted phone system, the majority of the solutions on the market are public offerings. This means they are shared between many businesses. In addition, your access to features are very limited as public cloud solutions only provide a handful of feature options and are not very customizable. Support for these solutions are limited as it becomes a carrier model of support; thus, less intimate support by calling an 800 number or going to the providers online portal for assistance of training tutorials

Private Cloud Phone System: A private cloud phone system is when you leverage on premise technology; however, move it to a co-lo or data center. In doing so, you will have access to full features of the phone system and it's extremely flexible for your business needs. This is the most flexible cloud solution on the market today. It allows you to leverage existing infrastructure as well as voice and internet circuits you may have current Agreements on and design a solution that is customized to your business.

Cloud Phone System over Another Providers Internet: When you look into a cloud phone system you may have the option to ride it over another provider's internet. If you choose this option, you could be leading to a disaster as quality of your voice calls are less controlled thus potentially leading to call quality that is not up to par. Cloud phone system providers simply allow you to ride their hosted phone system product over another provider's internet in order to drive down costs and appear to be the better option among competition. The professionals at Converged highly discourage this design setup due to the potential of poor quality calls.

Cloud Reliability

A huge benefit of cloud phone systems is the cloud reliability. Whether its public or private cloud, since the intelligence remains elsewhere, any building issues that come about don't affect your systems as features and functionality reside elsewhere. Some prospective cloud-adopters wonder what will happen if the cloud encounters issues. The safest solution to this is to implement Private Cloud solutions; with this you can build local redundancy in order to operate under a building, internet, or data center outage.

Selecting the right Cloud solution for your business depends on several factors including:

• Business needs
• Features and functionality required
• How much of your work force is: remote, at home, mobile?
• If you have a preference with IP desk phone hardware
• If you'd like more intimate support or if getting standard support and online tutorials sufficient
• How many total users you have
• If you have call center or contact center functionality
• Need for Faxing
• If you have any analog devices such as faxes, credit cards, alarms, or overhead paging devices that need to be hooked up
• Where your remote sites are located
• If you need any cloud business application to integrate with your solution such as Microsoft Lync, Salesforces, Microsoft Office 365 O365, and Google for Business, etc.
• If you have any internal business application that needs to be integrated into your solution such as your client database, CRM, etc.

Converged Consulting

In the past couple years, the market has been inundated with cloud solutions and clients are even more confused on which option to pick from. Contact Converged Communication Systems Account Management team to help review your needs as outlined below in order to build your own Cloud solution based on your business needs. We truly look at your business needs and help you connect with the right solution. We demystify the cloud with our Converged Cloud Services. Contact a CCS cloud specialist today by emailing us at sales@convergedsystems.com or calling us at 877-598-3999.