For many company leaders, their business cloud strategy has them picturing data centers and software applications “somewhere out there,” a fuzzy concept of binary code drifting around in the atmosphere. But as you consider how to implement unified communications as a service (UCaaS) or contact center as a service (CCaaS), you need a better handle on where your cloud choices are located.
In addition, there are significant differences between providers of these solutions, as well as even disparities between the various products they offer. As you evaluate which providers and solutions meet your needs, there are two considerations that are important to include:
Availability: Your business cloud strategy must consider how the location of your UCaaS or CCaaS provider impacts the end user. You need to ask what data center hosts the UCaaS and the location of the Telco interfaces. If the data center is located on the West Coast and your headquarters is in Virginia, you could have a latency of 60 or 70 milliseconds, creating a negative impact on voice quality.
UCaaS offers rich features that may be even more sensitive to location. A video conferencing tool can save travel costs and allow you to hire the best talent, regardless of geographic location, but when latency causes the connection to drop, your productivity and decision-making timelines will suffer. It’s important to ask whether the UCaaS solution you choose will be deployed from the location situated closest to your headquarters.
Strategic Possibilities: It’s also important to examine the potential for strategic decisions around your UCaaS and CCaaS. For instance, you may be using a separate cloud data storage solution, but if you choose a UCaaS or CCaaS provider that is on the same platform, it can help eliminate external processes. It can help you save resources on data storage as well as data transport costs.
This isn’t an airtight strategy; some UCaaS and CCaaS providers charge for your company to store their data. You may also find that there are limitations around utilizing data outside of the application due to proprietary formatting or encryption obstacles. But it may still be worth it to overcome these challenges in order to integrate your communications data. There are three important areas of analysis for a strategic approach:
- Find out where the UCaaS or CCaaS solution would be storing your data.
- Examine ways to store the data in a repository and the “distance” (albeit virtual) of that repository.
- The potential for using your own data lake or repository.
The adoption of UCaaS and CCaaS as part of your business cloud strategy is a great way to reduce costs, add rich features that improve the customer experience, and boost productivity in meaningful and measurable ways. To learn more about developing a migration plan that anticipates both obstacles and opportunities for optimizing the technology, contact us at Safari Solutions.
