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July 24, 2019
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4 min read

Cloud Telephony: Voice of the future, today.

Organisations are now adopting the latest technology to streamline a range of business administration and processes, one of the latest being Cloud Telephony. 

Cloud Telephony, such as Google Voice (an additional Google Workspace service), comes with many benefits over the more traditional on-premise solutions. However, one of the benefits rarely touched upon is the ability to ease day-to-day administration and consolidate offices in different locations.

Imagine being able to control onboarding/offboarding at the press of a button, ensuring company security or indeed cutting hardware costs due to the cloud management involved in modern systems. This is especially true for organisations that have merged or acquired companies running on different systems and then had to try to integrate with their own.

For some companies, in this scenario, the acquisitions happened years ago, and the enterprise has been living with the pain and expense of a tangle of diverse systems for a long time.

Companies that are looking after multiple locations with on-premises PBX have to contend with the fact that different locations could be running disconnected systems of different ages with different capabilities. Systems may not even be from the same vendor. Capabilities may be lost to interoperability problems. Productivity may be lost to inefficient communications. Getting every location onto a single standard may look close to an impossible task, but this is where cloud-based telephony really begins to shine.

The Advantages

Cloud telephony allows the consolidation of equipment and allows IT managers to benefit from standardised capabilities and total interoperability across locations. When system upgrades happen, they happen everywhere simultaneously, maintenance can be outsourced to your IT provider (such as Cobry) and fewer resources are required to understand and use systems across the business. 

Processes can also be standardised for greater efficiency, and in most cases, you are able to reuse Cloud-ready hardware to reduce costs. Simply put, for businesses who want phone systems working together across multiple locations, cloud-hosted telephony systems present a much simpler and cheaper option to implement and maintain.

For users, the ability to keep in touch everywhere and on any device connected to the internet enables freedom not previously enjoyed, while your phone number follows you across these devices - low battery on your phone, no problem, use your laptop/tablet instead. Integrations with other services such as Hangouts Meet and Calendar, if Google Voice is chosen, ensure smooth and productive communications. 

Further advantages also include no limits to adding new users, email transcription, spam call blocking, auto-attendant functionality and ring groups and, best of all, controlled from a single administration console.

Switching to Cloud Telephony

If your organisation is large or complex, making it hard to warrant an immediate switchover, you can take a staged approach. You are able to start with a cloud-based system at one location or department as part of a larger deployment. This is a clever, phased approach to phone system migration that’s gaining more steam among businesses that don’t want to replace all at once.

Still, some IT managers feel safer maintaining hardware that’s nearby, with the belief that the system may be pretty robust. It’s easy to run down the hall to a server closet if something goes wrong, right? But on-premises PBX systems are also dependent on forces outside a company’s control, an electrical grid outage, an Internet outage, a fire, burglary or severe flooding. Business continuity and disaster recovery is an often overlooked benefit of cloud deployment in general.

To Summarise

However you decide to approach upgrading your telephone system, one thing is clear, hosted communication is rapidly becoming the norm for businesses regardless of size, vertical or site complexity and shows no sign of slowing down.

Contact

As official Google Cloud Partners, Cobry has deployed Google Workspace and Google Voice for organisations of all sizes throughout Scotland and across Europe. 

If your organisation is making the move to Workspace or is now considering adopting Google Voice, please drop your details below – we would be delighted to have a chat about how we can help.

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