Benefits of Cloud Telephony for Small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs)

Cloud telephony replaces conventional telephone equipment such as a PBX with third-party VoIP service. These VoIP services are accessed over the public Internet. Organizations using Cloud services only pay for services or applications they use. This provides very useful alternatives for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that want to provide telephony services through reliable and secure communications without the headaches associated with the deployment of the conventional PBX system.

Cloud telephony services are mostly used for unified communications, telemarketing, hosted PBX, and e-commerce among others. For SMBs, the investment to set up their own VoIP infrastructure could be too high. However, cloud telephony may offer the same services at a much lower cost. Using cloud telephony also relieves organizations to have dedicated human resources for maintaining traditional PBX systems.

Cloud Communications

The blending of various communication methods is known as cloud communications. These include integrated methods such as speech, email, chat, and video to minimize or eliminate contact lag. Cloud communications are simply connectivity over the internet. In the cloud, storage, software, and switching are managed and hosted by a third party. The term cloud services refer to a subset of cloud communication. Cloud communications is one of the services provided by cloud service providers, and it serves as the main data center for businesses.
With the launch of VoIP, cloud communications transitioned from data to voice (voice over Internet Protocol). Cloud telephony is a subset of cloud communication that focuses on voice communications.

Benefits of Cloud Communication Platform

When enterprise businesses are looking for a voice solution, a full cloud communications solution is frequently mentioned as an option. As new cloud-based technology is introduced and market demand continues to shift in that direction, competitors parade new features and pricing to catch consumers' attention. Both of these particulars will obscure the overall benefits of cloud communication systems.

The benefits that SMBs achieve through cloud telephony are the following:

Cost Savings

A business needs to have VoIP-enabled phones only and it costs for the number of users to connect with cloud telephony or utilize the resources. The calling within an office and between its departments is mostly free.

Zero Maintenance

No need to have experienced staff to set up, install and maintain the traditional telephony system in the right condition to keep the business running smoothly. Businesses only need to have a fast internet connection shared among different phone devices that are connected with the LAN network to make them alive.

Robust and Secure

Using cloud telephony also ensures that you will have access to the latest software and technology. This means that your VoIP-enabled telephone system is secure and using call encryption technology such as SRTP, ZRTP, and SIPS.

Easy to Scale

Cloud telephony allows you to alter your services according to your requirements. Your business can grow or shrink. If your business is growing, then scale up by adding new extensions to meet your demands. If your business is not going as expected, then you can scale down by removing additional extensions to reduce cost. All it takes is just a click of a button on your telephony service provider's web portal.