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Everything is offered through the cloud now. What was once a glint in the eye of tech visionaries such as Oracle (News - Alert) CEO Larry Ellison and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff (who worked for Oracle before he started Salesforce, incidentally) is now ever-present in the modern business landscape. If you have a need, there’s a cloud service offering that can meet that need.

This is no less true for phone service. Yet, many businesses avoid cloud phone solutions because good telephone service is a necessity and there are many myths about hosted phone solutions.

The cloud may not be good at everything, but I am here to report that telephone service through the cloud is one hosted solution that just makes sense.

So, that in mind, let’s clear up a few myths many have about hosted telephone solutions.

One of the most common myths is that cloud-based calling suffers from poor voice quality. This is an understandable fear, since we’ve all used services such as Skype and Google (News - Alert) Voice only to discover that the quality was unreliable at best. We’ve also had Internet fail at times, and we of course therefore assume that our hosted phone solution will suffer similarly.

Thankfully, though, this is not the case. Latency and network speeds can be a problem in theory, but in practice hosted phone providers have beefed up networking that come with assured quality of service and connections that offer reliable data transfer. This translates into voice quality that usually is above and beyond that of traditional calling, not below it. So the myth that voice quality will be reduced with cloud-based phone service is actually quite the opposite.

Another myth is that hosted call solutions are less secure. While it is true that there might be vulnerabilities in on-premise VoIP solutions that are not properly maintained, one of the advantages of hosted solutions is that maintaining the network and the security of calling is the primary business of the hosting provider. Cloud solutions provide enhanced security and can provide secure connections since hardware is maintained proactively and the latest technologies are in play, not older and unpatched technologies that might exist in on-premise business phone closets.

A third misconception is that hosted solutions are more expensive. The return on investment is quite good with cloud phone service, however, because there’s no need to buy or maintain equipment. Capacity can be scaled effortlessly to meet demand, whether that’s scaling up or reducing capacity, and implementation time is dramatically cut since one of the fundamental benefits of the cloud is its ease of use.

Which brings up one of the last major myths surrounding hosted phone service: That it is complicated. To that I only ask: Is cloud-based email harder or easier than running a Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange server? The same logic applies to hosted phone service. Because the complexity is handled at the cloud level, businesses actually find in just about all cases that cloud-based phone service is simpler and easier to use.

Cloud-based phone service makes a lot of sense for businesses, and any firm that is using on-premise phone solutions is probably behind the times and leaving opportunity on the table at this point.