5 Things to Look for in a Cloud Provider

Here are five things to look for in a provider to help build a long-term strategic partnership and manage an entire enterprise’s communications.  

1. Flexibility

You want to make sure that the provider has a lot of flexibility in the types of solutions they can deploy for you as well as giving you a lot of flexibility in terms of what you want to configure.

Not all businesses are created the same.

Not all business even have the same needs over the course of time in a given year.

Some businesses have seasonal peaks and valleys.

You want to be able to flexibly ramp up or scale down the types of unified communications (UC) need for your employees.

For instance, if you have a lot of contact centre advisors during a given session, you want to be able to turn up the number of users and then take that back down again later.

2. Mobility

One of the key advantages of communications now is the ability to deliver communications to anybody, anywhere on any device. It’s great to have all those services in the cloud and then deliver those to any connected location: your desk phone in the corporate office in one location or your home office in another location, onto your smartphone as an app, or in a variety of other mechanisms.

Maybe you need it delivered to an instant messaging and presence client like Jabber, Skype or an immersive team collaboration app like Spark. You’ll want to make sure your partner has the ability to deliver these to your system and your workers.

3. Efficiency

You want to take advantage of the economies-of-scale that cloud UC gives you versus on-premises UC. With on-premises UC, you have to buy all the equipment, deal with all the maintenance contracts and all those support agreements.

With cloud UC, you can push all that up to the cloud vendor, someone like West who takes that burden on for you. In that case, the provider maintains all those things, upgrades, maintenance, etc. This allows you to take advantage of the latest and greatest technology as it comes out, without the hassle of additional expenses and labour.

4. Control 

When you go to the cloud, you don’t want to lose control from an IT perspective. Most companies don’t want to just outsource everything to the cloud and then not have any insight or control over operations.

Most companies still want to have complete transparency and the ability to access the system as needed and manage issues related to your users, numbers, circuits and everything else that comprises UC.

Vendors like West can ensure that you are involved as little or as much as you want in the day-to-day management of your service, retaining control through a unified portal that allows you to log in and view/manage everything going on in your environment.

5. Service 

How experienced is your prospective cloud provider? You don’t want to get someone who just started in this business, frankly. You want a provider who has a proven track record, who has been in the industry for a while, and who has a referenceable set of customers who have remained with the provider over the years.