For years, businesses have relied on traditional landlines to enable their customers, colleagues, and other stakeholders to communicate with one another. It’s a tried-and-tested method that works. 

Today, though, the world is moving towards cloud-based telephone services: ordinary voice-based calls routed through the internet instead of landlines. These systems offer a host of benefits that businesses love. Please take a look at them below. 

1. Cost Savings

Owning and running a traditional business telephone service is not cheap. Not only do you have to pay monthly fees to the line and interchange provider, but you also have to employ people to maintain it too. The expenses soon add up. 

The same is not true, however, of internet-based telephone services. Here you can add additional people to the network at near-zero marginal cost without having to expand your on-premises physical systems at all. The service provider does it all for you in the background. 

2. Flexibility And Scalability

While the costs of full feature cloud-based telephone providers, such as Carolina Digital Phone, are roughly the same as on-premises IP unified communications systems, their ability to scale is not. Investigations reveal that cloud-based telephone-as-a-service solutions make it much easier for businesses to expand than their traditional rivals. 

Why is this? 

Fundamentally, it comes down to the nature of the infrastructure. With a physical telephone service, you have to hook up a new terminal to the mainline every time you want to add a user. With a cloud-based platform, however, adding new users is a purely digital exercise. You just create a new account, expand the bandwidth for making calls, and that’s it: you’re ready to go. 

What’s more, management doesn’t have to concern themselves with making extra lines operational. It’s all done by the third-party telephone service provider. 

3. Better Support

If you’re a business owner or manager, then the last thing you want is to have to concern yourself with troubleshooting your phone system. You’re not an expert, so why should it be your responsibility? 

Local telephone company Carolina Digital Phone, manage all the technical difficulties for you. With a cloud-based service, you get readily-available customer support staff, ready to answer your questions and help you through any technical difficulties that you may be experiencing. 

Remember, operatives administer cloud-based telephone services remotely. So if there’s a problem, they can often solve it without an on-site visit. What’s more, if you choose to use a local supports, then you can get expert installation and configuration that may not be available through a national supplier. 

4. Higher Reliability

Traditional phone systems have many points of failure. Everything from random circuit issues to hurricanes can put them out of action, leading to damaging business downtime.

Cloud-based telephone services, however, aren’t as easy to shut down because they don’t operate on your premises. Instead, all of the magic happens on a plethora of servers located elsewhere. Thus, even if one data center goes down, others than can take over, providing you with a continuous, seamless service. 

Geographic redundancies like these are essential. They allow you to mitigate risk and continue operating, even when facing a natural disaster such as storms, flooding, and fires. Cloud-based telephone services also enable you to avoid being cut off from your customers in the event of a power cut or the internet going down. All your employees have to do is connect their mobile devices to the local mobile telephone network to log into their communication portals, enabling them to continue making calls on the company’s behalf. 

Reliable systems like this give you peace of mind and reduce the risks that your business faces. It is rare for companies to lose all communication capacity with cloud-based telephony solutions in place. Multiple failures must coincide, which is unlikely.  

5. Better Security

It is trivial for cybercriminals to tap a traditional telephone line. All they need is a simple piece of equipment to listen to everything you and your staff are saying to glean private information about your business, customer details, and trade secrets. With cloud-based telephone services, however, is it not nearly so easy. 

Communications that you make over the cloud are end-to-end encrypted. It means that even if somebody did intercept your calls, they’d need to decode the information to extract meaning - something that is impossible without the correct key. 

What’s more, cloud-based services can react to new threats in real-time, updating their software in response, keeping you safe if hackers release new malware. Making changes to legacy systems is much more difficult because of the costs involved.