As a business, investing in a hosted services provider than can help plan for your capacity needs is a big step towards efficient communications. But for the provider, the role is a tad more complex.
As a customer of hosted telephony services, there are benefits to going virtual. In a hosted model, the business only needs to make a nominal investment in telephone sets that are compatible with IP telephony, and does not have to worry about operating, maintaining or upgrading their network to support VoIP.
Hosted phone systems are also a good choice when a company or organization can’t be bothered with complicated solutions. There is no longer any need to worry about scalability and upgrades due to capacity requirements. Managing line cards, trunk cards or space in your overall capacity is not required. Hosted service providers handle capacity, performance and configuration of the total IP system.
However, on the provider side, there are challenges when it comes to planning proper server capacity, as not everyone uses data the same, so models will change as the customer’s needs change. A provider will need to properly assess each situation with virtual server capacity planning.
Virtual server capacity planning requires administrators to predict how resource usage may change in the future, analyze the impact of these usage variations on performance, and accordingly advise on what needs to be done to ensure optimum performance in the future. Should capacity be increased? If so, how much?
As a customer, it’s beneficial to rely on a provider who can take care of this for you. Providers should report on ability, measure and report your enterprise's capacity, ensuring it’s always efficiently allocated.
Customers expecting to use a cloud service have high expectations with regards to time to deploy a service, therefore sufficient capacity must be on hand to deploy new virtual machines based on both steady state and unexpected increases in demands. A high degree of capacity planning must take place to predict future capacity needs ahead of demand and allow for the slower process of procuring and installing physical servers, networks and storage.
A hosted service provider should take care of that on its end so you, the client, don’t have to invest in your own additional servers, time and resources. What do you get in return?
High quality, flexible and scalable communications services without the major upfront financial hit. All of the inner-workings of the system are at the hosted provider’s facilities. Additionally, it costs less over time and is future-proof. This is because software and equipment are updated by the provider as it becomes available, rather than being stuck with outdated equipment.
Adding a hosted phone system gives you the tools necessary to conduct phone, video, and Web conferencing through a single, easy-to-use interface. With the right system, you can stay up to date on the latest technologies and keep communications always in the now.
Edited by Alisen Downey