Small business VoIP and UC have usually been installed on premises. But according to Steve Taylor, president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials, and Jim Metzler, vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates, “it's probably time to consider a adding this to your cloud strategy.”

Taylor and Metzler cite "2011 Sourcebook for VoIP and UC Services,” produced as a joint effort of Delphi and Webtorials, as recommending that "moving to a cloud or hosted offering for communications is the next big thing for CIOs to consider.”

Among other reasons, they mentioned the rapid expansion capability, flexibility, cost control and expense reduction of cloud. Those benefits have been known for a long time, of course, but now call quality, traditionally the sticking point when it comes to cloud, is improving as well.

"There are cloud/hosted IP Telephony (IP PBX), Unified Messaging (UM), call center and Unified Communications (News - Alert) (UC) services,” Taylor and Metzler say, noting that these services can also support backup and recovery for remote offices and, in their words, “deliver business continuity at a lower cost.”

Which is good, since as they say, this means acquisition and support costs can be reduced and hey, service levels may even be improved. What’s not to like?

The two industry pros see the value of CaaS, or hosted communications, in that the enterprise accesses the services through the Internet in the overwhelming majority of instances. This means you don’t need to buy a lot of hardware -- though in reality, of course, as they note, you’re going to be splashing out some cash for endpoints, like IP phones, and some internal network to access the services or software.

And you’re sharing the servers, if that’s a problem for you security-wise. In most cases it isn’t, but check with a cloud security consultant for specific questions.

In March TMC’s (News - Alert) Linda Dobel wrote that the benefit of CaaS that receives the most buzz is cost control. With CaaS you will have a fixed, predetermined monthly cost for communications. Gone will be the days of budget wrangling over the costs for using, maintaining and repairing, as well as upgrading, on-premise tools. With the service model of communications, all of these items will be taken care of by a third party at a fixed cost.