Want to move away from the headache of on-premises equipment?

Although your business may be absolutely ready to move ahead, your phone system is most probably inflexible, rigid, and stuck in the past. Traditional phone systems have not and cannot keep up with the needs of the modern workforce.

From the handset on the desk to the PBX down the hallway, it’s like everything in the office has moved on except the telephone system.

The cost of maintaining a PBX grows exponentially as it gets older, and the expense and hassle of an upgrade can be pretty scary. Plus, the longer you put off an upgrade the more unreliable and out of date your system becomes.

If you recently (let’s say in the last five years) invested in on-premises technology, no doubt you have thought about what you will do when it gets to end-of-life.

There are a number of potential headaches of on-premises equipment that you’ll need to take into account as you get closer to end-of-life, things you will never have to think about under a cloud model:

• Business downtime due to either power outage or power failure either due to hardware issues or natural disasters
• Slow deployment when new software is needed due to hardware procurement requirements plus testing and change management procedures
• Infrastructure capacity planning is hard to manage when your business needs to grow
• Growth requires big upfront capital, which will be spent on operating systems, software, hardware and equipment.

Should you make another heavy capital investment to update your technology?

Probably not. Or at least, it depends.

The best way to answer this question is to be sure that you completely understand your business, and what it takes to support it. What’s your business preference in regards to capital expenditure versus operational expenditure?

A premises-based model requires capital expenditure in purchasing the hardware and software up front, along with your staff’s time to build the system, or in hiring a third party to do it. In a cloud model, while there are some installation costs, the real costs come in the operating expenditures that pay the monthly fees.

Cloud offers other advantages for the modern workforce.

With cloud solutions, you are always up-to-date with the latest version of the product you are using, meaning your organisation is always benefitting from improvements and new features, without having to make any updates yourself. It will save you money on installation and maintenance fees and because you will be able to access a multi-tenant cloud environment, you can be assured of high availability, business continuity and fully up to date functionality. What’s more, cloud will deliver true scalability for your business, allowing you to add and remove services when you need to, plus add features and functions as your business grows and changes.

Take your time in this phase of planning for the new system. Really learn about your business and it’s future. Be brutally honest about your staff and it’s capabilities. And make your decisions from real information, not guesses or opinions.

To help you get rid of your PBX headache, give our team a call on 1300 851 993 and we’ll take you through the options available for your business.

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