Switchboard In The Cloud, Lower Costs, And Goodbye Maintenance

Switchboard In The Cloud: The health emergency that has hit us hard in recent years has forced radical changes to the organization of work and a rapid acceleration in the adoption of remote work; all of this implies radical changes in workers’ habits and requires updates and new implementations at a technological level. 

This change process has now been triggered, and even after the pandemic is over, the new organizational methods will remain. The observatory of the Milan Polytechnic has photographed the situation. Also, it offers essential indications for the future: the study estimates that around 5.35 million Italian workers will continue to work remotely in whole or in part even in the coming years. It is interesting to note that this figure is made up of 1.72 million workers in large companies and 920,000 employees in SMEs. For micro-enterprises, the estimated figure is equal to 1.23 million, which rises to 1.48 for employees of the Public Administration. 

It is, therefore, a new normal to which organizations must quickly adapt. In this particular situation, the technologies that exploit the cloud have proved to be very useful, as the flexibility these solutions offer is well suited to new needs. 

Migration to IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) solutions are underway in many organizations: virtual desktops and cloud storage are the most widespread areas, but the adoption of cloud-based telephone switchboards is also a possibility to be evaluated, also and above all, in cost relation. In confirmation of this trend, we should mention a study published by Gartner ( Predicts 2021: Cloud and Edge Infrastructure ), which, with few figures, effectively summarizes the process underway: it is estimated that by 2023 40% of the enterprise-level work will be outsourced to IaaS structures and cloud technologies; in 2020 that percentage was 20%. 

These growth trends and the new organizational needs related to remote working impose new strategies on organizations to adapt their infrastructure, especially in the communication and collaboration fields. 

Cloud-based PBX systems simplify data centers.

Cloud-based telephone switchboards actually allow for a massive simplification of the infrastructure: an initial approach in which the connection with the PSTN network is still managed in-house can be followed by a more radical transition to a completely cloud solution. The effects on costs are important. Let’s describe them. 

The first consequence of switching to a cloud-based telephone switchboard is no longer having to directly maintain and manage the PSTN networks, thus eliminating the related costs. These resources will be made available by the service provider through its own data centers: in fact, the organization’s telephone communications are transferred as data traffic to the provider’s data center and subsequently routed to the telephone network. 

Switchboard in the cloud: cost control and less maintenance

With a similar approach, cost control also improves significantly: the telephone service component becomes a fixed fee, without the maintenance and management costs of hardware resources typical of more traditional solutions. Furthermore, in terms of scalability, there is ample margin: the increase or reduction of users can be managed by modulating the subscriptions to the service agreed with the manager. 

A cloud-based telephone switchboard also offers the possibility of saving in terms of terminals that dedicated applications for PCs or smartphones can replace. A similar solution is particularly suitable in a smart working regime where you do not have all the devices typical of your workstation at your disposal. 

The cloud telephone switchboard integrates perfectly with other services related to productivity and allows you to create a user-oriented network and not a single device: it will be the user who, based on the situation, will be able to answer with the most suitable device, to the full advantage of productivity. 

Integrate telephone services with productivity applications.

Relying entirely on a switchboard in the cloud, from the user’s point of view, it is possible to also manage the telephone component with the resources typically used for productivity. In this way, it is possible to obtain a good level of integration of services and some studies indicate that such a scenario can lead to significant savings in terms of time. For example, Forrester suggests that for executives of organizations, the ease of access to services offered by a single tool reduces decision-making times by 17%. 

Adopting a cloud PBX in your organization offers undoubted simplifications for the hardware components, allows exact cost control, and offers excellent scalability. However, this is a strategic service for the company: planning the migration carefully by relying on qualified partners is necessary.  

The latter will also be able to guide the customer as regards the choice of service and the following configuration, thus making the most of the integration with other software solutions related to personal productivity.

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