Internet phone service has slowly taken the market share from the conventional phone services. It has offered many features to its customers that were not offered by landline or cellular networks. Similarly, cloud computing has also taken the world of data centers by storm. Modern VoIP phone service providers are switching to cloud computing for several reasons. Let us have a look at what cloud computing is and how is it playing an important role in future of the VoIP service industry.
What is cloud computing?
Courtesy of Esparta (flickr)
Cloud computing enables the delivery of computing as a service. The main aim of introducing this service has been to centralize all the hardware and software resources at one place. There can be different types of services offered through this technology like software, data access, computation, and cloud services. Users of cloud services do not necessarily need to have the knowledge of the configurations involved. Common medium of accessing the cloud is via a web browser. There are numerous examples of cloud computing services around us, including IaaS like Amazon AWS and SaaS like Google Docs. Many business organizations have started using cloud-based services to their advantage. There are various cloud computing deployment models in use nowadays. Some of the commonly used models are community cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, and private cloud.
Benefits of cloud computing for VoIP industry
Cloud computing can offer several advantages to an internet phone service. Let us have a look at what these benefits are.
Reliability
Reliability is one of the most serious issues. A VoIP phone service provider cannot risk an outage. When a VoIP provider is maintaining its own servers, reliability can become an issue. However, a cloud computing service can offer much more dependability. Usually cloud computing services have extra backups to overcome any outages or critical crashes.
Costs
It costs a lot of money to maintain your own data center. VoIP providers that have maintained their own facilities for managing all the data know the expenses involved. Technical people are pretty expensive to hire. On the other hand, cloud computing services help internet phone service providers save all the costs that they need to successfully run their business. They do not need to take care of all the things at their end.
Maintenance
Costs and reliability are not the only issues for consideration in maintaining an internal data center. It is generally very complicated and resource intensive to maintain them. There are different types of hardware, software, and human resources involved. Increase in the number of subscribers for an internet phone service puts extra load on the resources. Cloud computing services can take off substantial load from these resources.
Data security
VoIP service providers usually maintain data at different locations, which increases threats to data security. Through agreement with a cloud provider, it is possible to store all the data at one single location or data center. This is another reason why futuristic VoIP service providers are already outsourcing many of their tasks to cloud computing service providers.
There is a long way to go before all internet phone services will shift to cloud computing. However, owing to extraordinary advantages of cloud computing advantages; many VoIP providers are already shifting to it.
No doubt clound computing has numerous advantages but the fact is right now, very few VoIP phone service providers have the ability to deal with the complications of cloud computing. Most of these VoIP phone service providers have nothing but one glittering web site. Therefore, to those, who are new to the industry, i would not recommend cloud computing.
I agree that. Although, every VoIP phone service provider has developed a very glittering website but the fact is only a few of them have the ability to deal with the cloud computing. Many of them can’t handle even very ordinary features like caller ID. Only the few main VoIP phone service providers can handle the VoIP setup properly.
This is perhaps the greatest misfortunity with the VoIP industry. Many people have jumped in to this industry without any proper knowledge. All they know is they need profit. They provide poor voice quality and billing systems are also not transparent. Those want to use VoIP has to remain limited to the main VoIP phone service providers only.
The Big advantage of cloud computing, it allows the use of cloud computing applications without installation and the access to personal /business files at any location through Internet access.