4 Reasons Hosted Communications Systems Make Your Business Future Bright

It’s a wildly mobile world out there — and businesses across the full spectrums of size and industry all know how challenging it can be to continue reshaping their foundations to accommodate on-the-go requirements, customer desires for instantaneous resolutions and beyond. The underlying connectivity and communications services that businesses use are now perhaps some of the most important facets of their day-to-day operations both internally and externally. As a result, the race is on to find the very best solution for new demands. However, in the race to find the most agile, empowered communications capabilities, the front runner that’s emerged is no surprise to those who know the power of the cloud. So, let’s get to know hosted communications systems’ four biggest business benefits.

Benefit 1: Scalability and Flexibility

Businesses today are growing in all sorts of ways for all sorts of reasons — at least, that’s the goal. Whether it’s expanding the business footprint to new geographic locations, bringing on new teams and team members or expanding the services and capabilities of the organization on behalf of customers. One of the core advantages of leveraging hosted communications systems in the cloud is the ability to scale and remain flexible for any oncoming change, expansion or adjustment.

The cloud is highly adaptive and elastic due to its virtualization, making it easier to allocate any necessary resources instead of taking time to physically manage servers, storage infrastructure, network components or even physical phones. This enables time savings in the form of quick deployments and upgrades no matter where communications need to go for business growth. To see these benefits in action, let’s consider a hospitality business. Say a hotel chain wants to enhance guest experiences — hosted communications systems can enable that hotel to easily accommodate occupancy fluctuations for performance, and (if it’s a chain or multi-location business) standardize practices across the entire footprint with cloud-hosted, feature-rich communications apps.

Benefit 2: Cost Efficiency

Speaking of removing the need to physically manage network or communications components any time a business wants to expand or add features, another huge benefit that hosted communications systems bring is the ability to save money. Traditional communications require organizations to manage, add and refresh costly on-premises hardware. Maintenance costs can skyrocket from this arrangement, especially for larger organizations, but the time, resources and talent required to keep communications seamless can take a toll on bottom lines. In an economic climate where everyone wants to keep some extra change in their pockets, the cloud can make all the difference, allowing organizations to remove these barriers to success.

Let’s consider how much money this can save in instances like telehealth and telemedicine. With the cloud’s ability to deliver seamless and powerful communications anywhere, providers are empowered to save boatloads of time, complexity and money by using virtual, cloud-based video strategies and online communications channels. Not to mention, this also offers greater reliability — which brings us to our next point.

Benefit 3: Business Continuity and Reliability

Outages spell disaster for any organization looking to deliver the best experiences and most optimized collaboration both between its own employees and between its brand and its customers. Cloud-based hosted communications systems offer redundancies, disaster recovery capabilities and failsafes that many organizations simply can’t attain through their own resources. With traditional systems, a local outage can take down an entire business, but since the cloud is far more ubiquitous and has tons of infrastructure to cover any unexpected gaps, an organization can safely assume their communications won’t be compromised.

Removing vulnerability from local disasters or unexpected downtime is critical in an era when more organizations are prioritizing work-from-home and at-distance operations. From geographically diverse data center backups to robust internet connectivity fabrics, the cloud keeps hosted communications systems safe from failure — so anyone can accomplish what they need to at any time. For instance, in government services, this can be a great help in keeping essential community operations running and citizen requirements met. In the case of a disaster or safety threat, uninterrupted communications can make all the difference.

Benefit 4: Collaboration and Extended Capabilities

Having optimized opportunities in today’s digital business environment is about more than just being able to chat with someone on the phone. What’s needed most these days is a full suite of collaboration features that help teams and priorities align seamlessly and achieve results effectively. Hosted communications systems are great in this arena, offering a range of video conferencing, instant messaging, file sharing and mobile app features. By enriching the ways businesses can connect both internally and externally, they create more successful teams, better customer outcomes and beyond. This kind of framework is device-inclusive and boosts productivity by a mile.

In environments like schools or college campuses, these rich communications features are vital for student learning opportunities, experiences and more. Teachers, students and administrators alike can benefit from virtual collaboration and education — and hosted communications systems make distance learning more inclusive too.

Don’t miss out on the advantages of cloud-hosted communications — check out our case study about how Glo Fiber Business’s Voice Connect solution helped a local YMCA build new programs and close the digital divide.