The ESI Blog

It's impossible to predict everything that could possibly happen to a business. Disasters caused by everything from the weather to human error have been known to force enterprises into countless amounts of downtime - or worse, total closure. Downtime is expensive, and every second that a company is unable to operate at full strength increased the likelihood of total shutdown. 

Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's the cloud!

One of the biggest talking points in the cloud conversation is security. Some people believe that reported cloud-related problems are enough to write the technology off as dangerous for business use. While things like toll fraud can scare many people into thinking that the cloud should be avoided for communications, there is something to remember - the cloud is only as strong as the protections put in front of it. Just like every other technology, the cloud fail if it is not deployed or managed correctly. 

October is well upon us, and Halloween is drawing closer. This is the time of year when scary stories are told around the campfire and kids get spooked by tales of ghosts and goblins. But year-round, there is another kind of horror story woven in the business world - one surrounding the cloud and it's perceived weaknesses.

When it comes to the flexibility of cloud technology and the workplace, Steve Perry of Journey sang it best: Anyway you want it, that's the way you need it. One of the biggest advantages to cloud unified communications is how much money it can save in different and interesting ways. With the rise in mobility and the consumerization of IT assets, people are now more easily able to set their own schedules and work outside of the office.

If one thing's for sure, it's that businesses need the cloud. Cloud computing has allowed for fewer physical restrictions on enterprise assets like communications. Having a telecom network in the cloud is a powerful thing - especially when talking about voice. Landline service may still be effective in many instances, but it lacks cloud functionality.

The cloud has suffered from a lot of unfair stigmatization. While there seem to be countless horror stories of clouds being breached or hacked into, what's rarely mentioned is that many of these issues are related to weak security practices on the user-end of the situation - or companies that simply don't understand what they're dealing with. The problem isn't with the cloud itself, but how it ends up being used.

Cloud technology is everywhere today - you just can't escape it! And for many small businesses especially, using the cloud as a communications tool helps them leverage a popular technology that allows them to use both voice and email side-by-side, and on more than one device! The industry is changing for telecommunications resellers and the time to include a cloud-based system in their portfolio is now!

It seems like everyone is moving to the cloud these days. Whether through an on-site deployment or a hosted provider, more companies are realizing that modern enterprise telecom needs are best met through the cloud. But while this new model of communication delivery is viable in that it can streamline daily operations, it is not a drag and drop solution - there are new considerations that have to be made before jumping right into the future.