Making the switch to cloud communication is no longer a shiny, new update. Now it’s an imperative, and it’s the only way to meet modern customer and employee expectations, reach business and sales goals, and stay ahead of competitors. Cloud communications was initially known for hosted voice over IP (VoIP), but providers today go far beyond simple PBX replacement, and you should look for one with a unified platform for every employee and customer experience, from voice to video meetings, from team chat to the contact center. Here you’ll find adaptability, elastic scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency. And you’ll be able to meet the changing demands of both your hybrid workforce and your customers.

Those employees and customers expect communications experiences that are on demand, easy to use, and accessible from any channel and device—things that cannot be guaranteed with an outdated PBX system. And beyond that, perhaps the biggest risk of your legacy PBX is that it can’t keep pace with accelerating innovation and change, which means neither can your business.

It’s time to make the move to the cloud frictionless.

There are many reasons to leave your aging PBX behind and upgrade your communications to the cloud. Here are five of the most critical ones.

Most legacy communications systems are made up of separate disparate solutions for essential capabilities. A typical system might include a PBX for core call control, and different solutions for services such as instant messaging (IM), directory/presence, web collaboration, video conferencing, and contact center solutions. That means siloed information across multiple platforms, various vendors and systems to keep straight, and multiple subscription and upkeep costs.

Even companies hoping to centralize communications on one vendor find that in order to meet all of their needs, they still must deploy individual solutions that don’t always talk to each other. Disjointed capabilities such as these can have a crippling effect on the productivity and effectiveness of your entire organization.

For example:

• The siloed, multi-vendor nature of legacy systems introduces complexity at every turn—from deployment to management, and maintenance to troubleshooting.
• Disconnected communications result in slow response times that diminish sales, reduce revenues, and erode customer satisfaction.
• Vendor lock-in for devices and infrastructure trap you into paying more over time to replace components as they become out-of-date or deteriorate.
• Point solutions offer little cross-platform integration. As a result, business users encounter inconsistent experiences, and often are seen to have lower productivity as they toggle between multiple apps and services to accomplish tasks.

With cloud VoIP, you can eliminate the enormous time and cost associated with deploying, integrating, and managing disparate multi-vendor technologies. You can consolidate vendor relationships for unified communications, including local, toll-free, international calling, and deployment solutions. Some cloud communication providers can even simplify vendor management to the point that even huge multinational enterprises can get all their communications services on one monthly bill.

Traditional communications platforms are too rigid to accommodate growth. As businesses adapt to changes (often unseen and unpredictable like the pandemic), adopt hybrid work models, undergo mergers and acquisitions, launch new international locations, and hire new employees, the communications systems must be able to adapt quickly and seamlessly. Bluntly, these are not possible with on-premises PBX.

Scaling services on these systems is slow, labor intensive, expensive, and involves countless nests of wires, routers, and switches. Cloud systems require only a public Internet connection—while also supporting MPLS, SD-WAN, and other private network connections. So there are no phone wires to run and no infrastructure to nurse. All the complexity moves off premises, off your plate, and into the cloud. Now more than ever, businesses need to be

able to meet the agility and flexibility expectations of their customers and employees. With the cloud, employees can have sophisticated communications services deployed in a matter of days and weeks versus several months. Even from an ongoing system management perspective, setting up new locations, adding or removing users takes a few minutes and can be accomplished from anywhere, without needing to work with vendors or IT specialists.

And because cloud systems often combine multiple capabilities, you can rapidly scale not only phone services, but everything your enterprise requires—modern desk phones, video meetings, contact center, instant messaging, internet faxing, and mobile capabilities—incrementally or all at once.

In today’s hyper-connected world, employees demand an entirely new realm of communications features that last century’s PBX systems were never designed to support. Using these systems, it’s often complex to bring even basic communications features like call forwarding, autoattendants, ring groups, and mobile voicemail notifications. Traditional PBX can’t extend communications into other business applications or integrate popular features like video conferencing or instant messaging. Sales and support staff are far more productive when the CRM applications they rely on are “communications-enabled,” with builtin web dialing and automatic call logging capabilities. However, when it’s possible at all, adding such features with traditional systems often requires expensive customization and professional services. New features may also be tied to hardware, which limits choice, increases costs, and continues to keep you locked into your old system.

The versatility and agility of cloud communications make them ideally suited for deploying the full range of features that empower people to be more productive and effective anywhere business takes them. In a cloud-based system, even highly sophisticated features such as mobile collaboration, hot desking, monitoring (barge, monitor, whisper), and integrations with business and productivity apps like CRMs and emails, are readily accessible and simple to use. What’s more, cloud solutions enable seamless, continuous communications experiences. For example, from a single application and a single workflow, employees can easily locate business contacts, check presence, and access click-to-chat, click-to-call or even click-to-meet features.

And unlike legacy PBX, cloud communications make it easy for companies to deploy new features centrally and remotely over the Internet, and with minimal IT assistance, reducing frustration, confusion, and IT costs. Upgrades are frequent so you have access to the latest features, which are rolled out in a way that doesn’t impact the user. There’s no downtime and no functionality is lost or unavailable while the new version is pushed. Companies with cloud systems can easily upgrade to new features as they come, and upgrading can become an opportunity, not a headache.

When it comes to gauging the effectiveness of business communications, traditional PBX implementations leave you in the dark. They offer little in the way of reporting or analysis. For starters, the fragmented, proprietary nature of these patchwork systems makes it very difficult to perform analysis. What scant insights you can extract from legacy technology are so slow and cumbersome to produce and so piecemeal as to be all but unusable in any practical sense. Without access to timely, relevant data, you lack critical insight and accountability over your investments in your communications systems.

In contrast to legacy systems, cloud communications are cohesive across the full spectrum of individual services. They also use open technologies, so they integrate readily with advanced analytics and reporting capabilities. And now that employees in hybrid systems can be working

from anywhere, the data and insights from analytics are more important than ever. With the visibility and transparency you get from cloud communications, you can replace hunches and guesswork with data-driven insight to make more informed business decisions. You can also gather data to drive system adoption and boost employee collaboration.

To get the most from analytics, consider cloud-based platforms that offer versatile interactive dashboards and custom reports. They enable you to monitor and track such aspects as active calls, unreturned calls, agent performance, and call queue status, allowing you to quickly identify areas that need improvement.

Of the many shortcomings of traditional PBX systems, their lack of adequate disaster recovery and business continuity may be the most serious. On-site legacy systems are not designed to provide continuous connectivity in the event of outages from natural disasters and other events.

For example, disruptions due to aging PBX infrastructure components, transportation strikes, and major construction projects can shut down all or part of a PBX system without warning. The costs from service disruptions can be severe, ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour. Moreover, communications failures can place employees and customers at risk and cause lasting damage to your company’s brand and reputation.

Cloud VoIP assures high availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity by design. Unlike traditional on-site PBX, look for a cloud provider with no single point of failure in a cloud implementation, with a financially-backed 99.999% uptime SLA guarantee.

The best cloud communications systems are hosted on redundant, geographically dispersed data centers. If one server in one part of the world fails, connections are continuously maintained on other mirrored servers in the system, so there are no service disruptions. In the event of a loss of Internet connectivity, for example during fires, earthquakes, or severe weather, calls in a cloud-based system can automatically route to mobile phones. In addition, if headquarters locations go offline, cloud VoIP offers the flexibility to connect via the Internet remotely. No matter what happens, employees can still connect with each other internally and with customers using their business number, keeping their personal numbers private.