Hosted Telephony, Cloud Communications, Hosted VoIP, Cloud Voice, Virtual Phone Systems, IP PBX. Whatever you call it, hosting your business telephone system in the cloud is the future of business telecoms.
What is Hosted Telephony?
With hosted telephony your telephone system resides in the cloud rather than in your office. Users access the system through a standard IP handset or a softphone – a screen-based virtual phone with headset. Calls are made and received over a broadband connection. This means, you can call people from anywhere in the world if you have an internet connection.
There is no PBX hardware to maintain on site or anywhere within your business premises. This is great news for businesses looking to adopt a new telephone system who might not have the PBX hardware in place already.
Traditional telecoms solutions don’t tend to be flexible enough to cope with fast-paced change. This is why more and more UK companies are opting for a hosted telephone solution over traditional fixed line telephony.
A hosted telephone system can not only meet your changing business needs for speed, flexibility and scalability. It can often deliver a more cost-effective communications solution than its predecessor. A hosted solution removes the hassle of managing your own PBX, while leaving you in control of your business telecoms.
The Benefits of Hosting your Phone System in the Cloud
Disaster Recovery – In the event of a disaster affecting your work place, it’s vital that you can still communicate. With a hosted phone system, you can divert all your calls to ring straight to your mobile or landline. You simply log into the portal remotely and divert all the calls yourself!
Scalability – Hosted telephony flexibility ensures your business can make scalable adjustments to your system whenever you need to. It’s completely modular, so you can start off small and as your business grows you simply add more phones to your system without the need for expensive engineers. In most cases, it really is as simple as buying the phones and just plugging them into the internet.
Reliability – Rather than relying on a dedicated copper wire to relay phone conversations, hosted systems digitise voice data before sending it down the same cables used for broadband. By relocating phone calls online, supremely reliable systems can be established, which are impervious to bad weather or broken phone-line.
Control costs more effectively. – The cost-savings involved with hosted phone systems are significant and is often the reason many businesses switch to hosted telephony. With Internet calls overall costs on hosted phone systems are significantly less than traditional phone services. There’s no minimal hardware to buy upfront, no maintenance costs and monthly charges are all inclusive. Hosted phone systems can cut monthly phone expenses up to 70%.
Easy set up – Just plug your VoIP phones into the Internet and you are up and running straight away.
Remote working. – You can quickly configure the system in accordance with your organisation’s changing requirements, whilst your staff can handle their calls simply and efficiently. This enables flexible work environments such as hot-desking, remote workers, Outlook and CRM integration. You can even extend the service to mobile devices. It’s perfect for remote workers or staff who need to work from different locations. ou can deliver business phone extensions to any employee, anywhere that acts as one seamless system.
A secure system – It’s often cited as one of the disadvantages of hosted phone systems. However, when it comes to security there’s really no need to fear the cloud. Maintenance and security responsibilities are put into the hands of trained, dedicated professionals. These people are dedicated to running a secure service, so you don’t have to. And should the worst happen, and something was to fail, then data will be rerouted to another part of the system, so you won’t even notice any downtime.
If you are still relying on a traditional PBX in your organisation, it could be time to consider moving to a hosted solution to realise all the benefits that cloud-based telephony has to offer. For more information about hosted telephony and how it can improve your business, please give us a call on 0800 50 533 50 or visit our Office VoIP Phone Systems page.
