Pros and Cons of Hosted vs. On Premise Phone Systems

Jim Machi : Industry Insight
Jim Machi

Pros and Cons of Hosted vs. On Premise Phone Systems



hosted vs cpe.pngPurchasing communications infrastructure equipment for your business, whether it’s data routers, SBCs or phone communication systems is difficult.  There are many vendor choices and a myriad of features for each system that can be confusing. In this blog series I want to try to simplify the choice by calling attention to a few details.

Business phone systems are not as simple as connecting the PSTN to a phone system in a building where all of your employees’ work.   Having a dispersed workforce, using many different kinds of phones, including mobile phones, is more of the norm today than it used to be.  Each of these end points needs to act like it’s on a single telephone system with a consistent numbering plan, even if the end point is in a different country.   Today’s “callers” can contact you by voice, text, instant message or social media.  So it’s really not as simple as it used to be.

To top it off, as data connectivity solutions have become faster, more secure and can now handle voice, the concept of putting your voice communication systems in a cloud, or off premise, is now entirely realistic.

There is no simple answer as to what you should do.  Every business has different needs and has employees with different skillsets in the company.  You may already have a phone system in place that works.  If you are happy with your PBX or voice mail or IVR for instance, and it’s not difficult to maintain, and the maintenance costs are small, why move that to the cloud?  It works, you paid for it and it does what you need it to do.   Maybe you are happy with all of that, but the original company either doesn’t support it anymore or is out of business, and you are concerned about keeping your business running in case the equipment decides to fall over, so you have decided you need to do something about it.  You might therefore need new equipment, either in the form of CPE or cloud.

In the next two parts of this series I’ll go over some of the pros and cons of each approach.  



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