Migrating to Cloud Communications: The Case for Leaving Your Analog Phones Behind

With support for legacy phone systems such as the copper wire-based PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) rapidly on the decline, there’s a case to be made for consigning old-school analog phones and their related hardware to the shelf of history – and stepping up to a more contemporary level of technology.

For the digital age, individual and corporate users are coming to appreciate the benefits of telecommunications technologies such as VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). And for both business and private users, there’s much to be said for the move to a hosted telecom solution that’s based in the cloud.

Here are just some of the reasons why migrating to the cloud and ditching those analog phones makes good sense.

Cost Savings With Digital

Unlike analog phones, digital cloud systems don’t require business users to buy, install, manage, and maintain an on-premises PBX (private branch exchange), and its related telephony hardware. This alone is enough to generate serious cost savings for an enterprise.

But hosted cloud telecommunications solutions also offer users the cost-saving advantages of IP (Internet Protocol) telephony, which is able to keep call charges down by routing voice signals as digital data over the internet. A hosted PBX from net2phone for example, could save you up to 70% on your existing costs.

Less To Manage And Maintain

Responsibility for infrastructure provision, maintenance, management, and technical support resides with your service provider, in a hosted cloud communications environment. This not only relieves your business of the burden of catering for all of these things – it also frees up your IT resources to concentrate on the more important matters that propel your business forward.

Scale Up Or Down, At Will

Provisioning and account management on a hosted cloud communications platform are a simple matter of a few clicks on your administrative dashboard – a web-based software console that’s accessible to you wherever there’s an internet connection.

You can use this facility to add or remove lines and channels, or to assign telephony features and tools in response to seasonal demands, staff changes, and fluctuating business conditions.

More Dependable Technology

The problem with legacy analog hardware is that there’s a constant battle to ensure that patches and fixes are applied, to keep old equipment compatible with the latest business technology trends. This often requires the purchase of adapters, converters, or new hardware.

With a cloud communications system running on digital hardware (which can be minimal, depending on your circumstances), any patches or fixes involved typically occur at a software level. And updates to the underlying infrastructure, operating systems, and applications of a hosted cloud system will be performed by your service provider.

Availability, Redundancy, And Disaster Recovery

In cloud communications, a hosted PBX provider will maintain an extensive array of infrastructure and servers, allowing for redundancy which ensures that your lines are always available. For instance, net2phone’s Telco grade platform has the capacity to field up to 450,000 simultaneous phone calls.

Call re-routing to designated phone numbers and devices, and configurable message-handling combine with the provider’s own Disaster Recovery and security measures to keep you always connected – even in the event of a network outage, natural disaster, or other unforeseen events.

Providing For The Future

Besides the scramble for “backwards compatibility,” analog phones also lack the capacity to grow and adapt with the changing times. In contrast, the digital technology employed by hosted PBX providers for cloud communications have “future-proofing” built in, and will allow you the speed, flexibility, and scalability to adapt and cope with whatever the years ahead have in store.

If you’d like to know more about cloud communications and hosted PBX, contact the experts at net2phone.