To cloud – or not to cloud – may be an easy decision at times, depending on your preferences, the enterprise’s culture, and the applications in question. For a business, Unified Communications (UC) is ideal candidate for a first move into the cloud. However, the decision-making process could be time consuming due to the nature and importance of UC.
To me, nothing beats a handy chart which lays out the pros and cons of each approach, without biases. Gary Audin’s latest TechNote, Deploying UC Apps: CPE or Cloud, provides such a chart, comparing two obvious choices to delivering the features and benefits of UC. It’s a quick read, comparing the two alternatives side-by-side.
It covers the key decision criteria such as security, staffing, high availability (disaster recovery), the economics of the two alternatives, and his conclusion on which one will be more effective at putting the menu of UC features in front of your user community.
As Audin points out, and illustrates in the chart, the customer premise equipment (CPE) approach – buying, installing and maintaining your own UC system – carries with it a high initial cost. There’s more than the cost of the equipment and software, too, since the equipment will need space in the enterprise data center and will need to be powered, cooled, and otherwise maintained.\
Audin gives the edge to the cloud there, but calls it a tie when it comes to phone and LAN costs. New IP phones and softphone licenses, and upgrading of the existing LAN if needed to carry voice and signaling traffic, will be a consideration with either approach.
The CPE approach has an edge when it comes to PSTN (phone network) connections and Internet connections. If all calls are going through the cloud provider, an Internet outage means that deskphones won’t work either. (One could argue that this is true for an enterprise network outage as well). Audin also notes that there’s a higher network cost with the cloud, since all calls will be carried over the Internet.
Security and disaster recovery are a toss-up. Audin gives the CPE approach the edge when it comes to security, since virtually all traffic stays within the enterprise network. But the cloud has the advantage in disaster recovery, since the recovery is built right into the service and an enterprise doesn’t need to worry about a backup data center.
Finally, the cloud wins the “people” cost category, since a cloud solution means lower staffing requirements for the enterprise.
Is there a clear winner? Not across the board, since so much is dependent on the specific needs of a particular enterprise. Like so much else in this business, you weigh your options and tradeoffs and hopefully come up with the best solution for your organization and your people.
