3 Ways Cloud Communications Can Save Your Company Money

These days, companies are demanding more from their technology. At the same time, IT budgets are decreasing, widening the gap between what employees want—and need to be more productive—and what IT can offer. The trick is to find technologies that make the most of the budget.

Enter cloud communications, which delivers full-featured, enterprise-grade communications to companies of any size. A cloud-based communications solution answers the call of feature-rich functionality at a cost IT budgets can handle. In fact, a cloud communications solution can actually save your company money.

Here are three of the biggest reasons cloud communications can help save money and make IT a hero to both employees and the finance department:

1. No Costly Infrastructure: Why spend time and money maintaining an onsite communications system? With cloud communications, your communications system is located offsite in a hosted data center, so you don’t have to worry about upgrades, maintenance or oversight. It’s all done for you.

What’s more, cloud communications can be billed as a monthly subscription service, shifting the cost from a hardware/software-intensive CAPEX model to simple OPEX model. The need for capital outlays to upgrade servers, software and other infrastructure components is greatly reduced, freeing money for other things on your company’s technology wish list.

For companies with multiple locations, the savings can be even greater with cloud communications. Instead of having separate hardware or a PBX system for each branch office, an Internet connection is all that’s needed.

2. Minimal Manpower: Rather than paying for a separate telecom person, your IT department can manage a cloud communications system as it would any other cloud service. And they can do it without having to gain additional knowledge.

Your company’s remote workers can set up their own phones and take advantage of online training. IT doesn’t need to be involved in setting up remote locations, saving both the IT staff and the employees’ valuable time.

3. Reduced Risk of Downtime: One of the many advantages of the cloud is redundancy, so downtime is minimal at best. Onsite PBX systems may be vulnerable to power outages, equipment failure or other issues impacting service. Cloud-based services, are protected by multiple layers of hardware and software to keep systems up and running should an outage or equipment failure occur.

Severe weather, distributed denial-of-service attacks or equipment failure all are factors contributing to downtime. But because a cloud solution is hosted in an offsite data center environment, the service automatically is routed to unaffected servers or locations, minimizing any lags in service.

Plus, the data center environment is monitored constantly, so should a shutdown occur it can be addressed immediately and service restored.

If your company is struggling to bridge the gap between the features employees need to do their jobs better and an ever-shrinking IT budget, cloud communications is one way to satisfy both sides.