Kandy’s Guide to Cloud Communications as a Service

The cloud is no longer the future; it is now, truly present and pervasive. The question for so many businesses is no longer whether to move to the cloud but when and how, and in particular which cloud service would best serve your company’s goals. It would be helpful to have a guide to help you determine which cloud service is best for your business and guide you to understand cloud communications as a service.
Business operations are inevitably impacted by cloud migration, so gaining a good understanding of the options available - and the opportunities and challenges they present - is a worthwhile first move. It’s especially important to work closely with a trusted communications partner specializing in the field and able to tap into the full landscape from public to private and hybrid cloud solutions.

Public Cloud, Private Cloud, or Hybrid?

For many companies, it’s not a matter of which one is best but rather which combination will best help reach the business goals.

It’s called multi-cloud service delivery. If it’s not part of your plan, you’re risking losing out on the next big opportunity to drive productivity and growth. With competition appearing from unexpected players like WhatsApp and Telegram, today’s carriers need to expand their offerings in unexpected ways. Understanding the options that the cloud has to offer is key. Choosing is about getting the balance right – but you can’t achieve that if you don’t have access to all the options.

• Public Cloud: The power of public cloud services has no limit, and it scales well and saves companies from investing in and maintaining their own on-premises IT resources.   This option reduces CAPEX investments which can be attractive to some companies.
• Private Cloud: Provides the most control and best data security of all the options. Operational and sensitive data are not accessible to third-party providers. This typically comes with a higher cost than the public cloud and requires additional operational support and maintenance further increasing the cost.
• Hybrid: For organizations that need close control and hyper-scalability at the same time, a hybrid cloud model may be the best option.

Businesses are different and have different requirements. Sometimes, there is no single best candidate.

Take, for example, a flower shop. On days of heavy traffic, like Valentine's and Mother’s Day, this type of business will need to scale up to handle the sudden influx of customers. But they only want to scale up when they're expecting to see this kind of traffic boost.

Carriers need to be able to respond to customer challenges like this.

A more recent option that may solve many of the challenges in the hybrid cloud model is the integrated public cloud offerings such as AWS Outposts, Azure Stack, and Google Anthos. These offerings from some of the largest Hyperscale Cloud Providers in the world give carriers options to deploy services previously only available in the public cloud into their own data center. This allows data sovereignty, locality, and security to be controlled mostly by the carrier vs trusting cloud providers in the public cloud model. This option is also very interesting in that it allows development teams to create applications and solutions on the public cloud but then bring this same solution into existing data centers that previously required in some cases two entirely different development teams or designs.

This fundamental change from the public cloud providers is evidence there will always be a need for on-premises and hybrid solutions. However, I believe the growth of these solutions will only lessen the need for other Storage, SAN, and HCI vendors as carriers will be able to just purchase a solution from a cloud provider that will include the HCI functionality and be very portable to the public cloud when conditions allow.

Cloud Boosting Digital Transformation

The demands on the cloud – and on carriers – are only going to intensify.

AI, automation, work-from-home, work-from-anywhere. . .the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation and it does not show signs of slowing down.

Working remotely is now a critical feature for businesses globally and offers opportunities for scalability. Organizations are leveraging the tremendous benefits of cloud communications to perform better and deliver faster.

Customizing Your Cloud Choice

Doing business globally has become more challenging than ever because of growing regulatory requirements for carriers. Different regions and countries have very different data retention and destruction rules. Sometimes, they even conflict with each other.

Cloud communications products must be adaptable so they can be customized based on the region or the locality.

“The public cloud can quickly scale, but typically the public cloud is not as flexible to meet custom requirements,’ Phil Karam advised. “Also, organizations won’t always know exactly where their data is nor will they really know how much resilience and redundancy there is.”

Cloud Communications as a Service

While covering the bases with thorough knowledge of cloud options and regional regulations is vital, customer service does not fall far behind.

Service delivery is a really important piece of Kandy’s overall cloud communications as a service offering, whether that’s UCaaS, CPaaS, or Teams DRaaS. Kandy only sells through partners, and we are constantly working with them in the channel to help them to help their customers.

Because carriers must be able to deliver high-quality cloud support and infrastructure 24/7, their cloud services provider needs to be available during the same time frame to provide assistance when necessary. Kandy provides this level of support around the globe.

Whatever questions you may have about which cloud option is best for your business, Kandy has the answer. Feel free to contact us using the Contact Kandy form below if you have questions.