At one time, a closet full of cables and telephony equipment was standard issue for businesses of just about any size. No matter the line of business, every firm needed desks, office phones, printers—and an in-house business phone network.

As workers begin to ditch their desks in favor of mobile work, from any location with an Internet connection, on-premises telephony hardware is becoming a thing of the past.

The new trend: hosted PBX (News - Alert) and business telephone as a service.

While owning and operating hardware was once a necessity and a competitive advantage, it now is an unnecessary burden, according to IBRS analyst Kevin McIsaac. On-premises hardware reduces agility, creates significant risks and hurts long-term sustainability, he noted recently in an article by CMO in Australia.

“CIOs should not be asking ‘if,’ but rather ‘when, how and to whom’ we let go of the IT infrastructure,” he said.

That’s because while historically organizations custom-build their own infrastructure, the commodity hardware model has changed the game.

Commodity components assembled in standardized, end-to-end architectures such as virtual machine clusters, database clusters and web farms have meant that it now makes more sense to outsource to a provider.

“This has led vendors (such as HP, IBM (News - Alert), Oracle and Dell) and service providers (Amazon, Rackspace and Telstra) to build standard designs that can be purchased ‘off the rack,’” noted McIsaac.

It is hard for businesses to achieve the same level or reliability and redundancy on their own even if they wanted, he suggested.

“A commercial data centre offers vastly superior availability (redundant power, cooling and networking), recovery (dark fibre to a secondary site) and security (robust physical controls) eliminating the minor benefit of an in-house facility (that is, proximity),” McIsaac noted.

The rise of cloud computing has also facilitated the change, as third parties can now deliver solutions such as PBX systems remotely in a way that just wasn’t technologically possible 15 years ago.

The smart move is now to hand over the headaches and telephony expertise to a provider. All that’s needed from an infrastructure perspective is modern VoIP-capable phones for the office that can leverage the features that come with most hosted VoIP solutions. IP phones such as those offered by Yealink (News - Alert) and a hosted provider are all that a business really needs to have a first class phone network these days.

McIsaac suggested that applications that can’t make the jump should be depreciated or phases out over time. It just doesn’t make sense to manage such hardware on-premise any longer; there is almost immediate ROI with hosted telephony solutions.