Moving Your Phone System to the Cloud: Pros and Cons

If you’ve been wondering whether cloud services might be a good fit for your business, then moving your phone system first could give you some insights into how the process works. This is a great idea for most businesses as well. Your employees can work from anywhere and still get all the amazing features your business phone system offers.

A number of experts like Gartner, believe that the cloud services market will greatly expand over the next few years. Markets like Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) are still in their infancy. Yet they’ve made quite an impact in the business world.

Can the Cloud Save You Time and Money?

Thousands of today’s businesses use Software-as-a-Service because it makes so much sense. Instead of buying an expensive program like Microsoft Office 365 and paying for all those licenses, then worrying about training employees etc., why not just buy the software as a service that is provided by your local managed IT service company?

When you follow this route, you never really own the software, but then you aren’t responsible for its updates, patches, glitches, licenses, training, etc. Your IT service provider is responsible for all that. This leaves you and your staff able to focus on projects and customers instead of technology problems.

Get the Most for Every Dollar

All cloud technology works that way to some extent, including a phone system. You’ll have the advantage of the latest hardware and software without having to install, monitor or maintain the system. However, despite this and the growing adoption rates, many companies still aren’t ready to make a full-scale move to cloud-based technologies.

And, it’s really not necessary to do so. By taking a measured approach to the cloud, you can gradually incorporate this technology into your business workflow. This will give you and your team a better idea of what to expect and how it works. You can get a handle on overall costs, reliability, flexibility and all those things that matter to your business.

Starting off by moving your communications system to the cloud is a pretty smart idea. Most businesses could get better services for their workforce and their customers with a cloud phone system. This is a fairly simple move that will get your staff ready in case you want to move more technology to the cloud later.

Need more reasons to make the move? Below are 4 great reasons to move your phone system to the cloud.

Small Steps: You can manage deployments in small groups

You might want to move only your customer service department to cloud communications right now. This would be much simpler than moving the entire company’s phone system. Plus, it would give you an idea of how easy it is and whether you’ll get much pushback from employees. This small move would be cost-efficient but give you lots of good information about the overall success of any future cloud deployments.

Set Your IT Staff Free: Make smarter use of internal resources

Most IT departments are overwhelmed. They simply don’t have the time to handle any extra projects. But with cloud-based services, they don’t have to. Part of the service is that the provider will handle all maintenance, security, updates, etc.

Flexibility: Subscribe to the features you prefer

With cloud services, you can mix and match, only subscribing to the specific features you want. Plus, cloud communications can evolve as your business grows. If you want to add features as your business grows, then it’s easy and inexpensive to do so. You’ll never be stuck in a long-term rigid contract.

Confidence: Get the security you need to move forward with other cloud-based technology

Once your staff gets immersed in cloud communications, you might consider moving other aspects of your IT infrastructure to the cloud. Cloud-based storage is a great idea. It provides good copies of your database that are stored at onsite and offsite locations. This is the ultimate protection for your data in case of disaster. There are lots more services that could be moved to the cloud. In most cases, you’ll find this to be a good solution that frees up your IT department and offers more reliable products and services.

CapEx Vs. OpEx

There are lots of other excellent reasons to take advantage of cloud services. Since they are a service, they can be expensed as an operating cost instead of a capital expenditure. This offers some tax advantages. Be sure to check with your accountant before moving forward.

Ready to Make the Switch?

Strong communications are important to your business success and Mitel is a well-known provider. Mitel delivers more than 2 billion connections every day and offers solutions that will support your business goals for today and tomorrow.

ICS is a valued partner with Mitel. Our team will work with you to help you find the perfect cloud communications products. We install and set everything up so that it best suits the way your employees work. If you need to add users along the way, it’s fast and easy.

Mitel offers a full range of high-quality cost-effective business communication solutions for small single location businesses to large organizations with multiple nationwide offices. The right phone system can increase mobility, utilizing unified communications within the organization.

ICS is proud to offer Mitel products and services to our clients. We believe they meet the highest standards. For more information about Mitel products or services and how they can benefit your organization, please call us at (866)-427-4722 or Contact us!

We serve Houston, San Antonio and Austin with best-in-class managed IT services including unified communications systems. We can help you understand how cloud technology can benefit your business.