So, the cloud – what’s your favourite flavour?
Public? Private? Hybrid?
Maybe Virtual Super-Scaled Hyper-Flexi?
(Don’t panic – that last one is a joke).
Point is, it’s a complex landscape where choice is great, but where decisions are often hard to make.
For communications carriers and end user organisations alike, the criteria are many and varied.
Scale, security, complexity, cost, regulation: they all play into one cloud type or another; often just as carriers are deciding on their UCaaS, CCaaS, Teams DRaaS, or CPaaS services.
The good thing, of course, is that functionality and availability are both givens.
But to really leverage the power of the cloud, organisations need a communications partner that has all the bases covered, and then some.
It’s called multi cloud service delivery – and if you don’t have it in your locker, you risk losing out on the next big opportunity to drive productivity and growth.
“Choosing is about getting the balance right – but you can’t achieve that if you don’t have access to all the options,” says Phil Karam, Director of Cloud Services at global cloud communications giant Kandy, who DO have all the bases covered.
“If an organisation needs to scale, then the limitless power of public cloud is going to be quickest. But the cost is going to be relatively high.
“If an organisation’s data is extra sensitive and they need to know where it is and have complete control over it, then private cloud is best.
“And if an organisation has lots of complexity and needs some hyper-scalability AND some close control AND they want to manage cost, then hybrid cloud may be the way to go.
“The point is that organisations are all very different and they have different requirements at different times.
“For example, on Valentine’s Day, a flower shop needs to scale to handle huge bursts of traffic, but then scale it back down for the rest of the year when it’s less busy.
“The smart carriers are able to respond to those challenges on behalf of their customers.”
Of course, those challenges are intensifying.
Unification, integration, automation, artificial intelligence: digital communication is getting more sophisticated all the time and global business is quick to devour every new innovation.
The demands on the cloud – no matter what flavour – are only ever going to increase.
“You just have to think about the last two years and the pandemic,” says Karam.
“There has been a huge shift to work-from-anywhere. The ability for people to work remotely is now critical for businesses globally, and with that criticality come scalability concerns.
“Doing business globally has become very challenging, with lots of regulatory requirements for carriers that make it tough.
“The US, the EU, Canada, UAE, Asia all have very different data retention and destruction rules and sometimes they even conflict with one another.
“So, we have to make our cloud communications product very adaptable so it can be customized based on the region or the locality.
“The public cloud can quickly scale but typically public cloud is not as flexible to meet custom requirements.
“Also, organisations won’t know exactly where their data is nor will they really know how much resilience and redundancy there is.
“Private cloud provides more control”
Alternatively, Kandy’s hybrid proposition offers the best of both worlds.
“The way we have responded to the various and multiple challenges of cloud provisioning is to build a very adaptive and flexible environment,” says Karam.
“We only sell through partners and we are constantly working with them in the channel to help them to help their customers.
“Given our carrier DNA, we are always going to have an option that works.”
But it’s not only functionality that is key.
To create sticky customers, carriers must be able to deliver high quality service 24/7 – impossible if their cloud services provider does not share the same ethos.
In Kandy’s case, it has an entire department dedicated to that cause.
“Service delivery is a really important piece of our overall cloud communications as a service offering, whether that’s UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS, or Teams DRaaS,” says Karam.
“We devote a lot of attention to ensuring our partners can successfully deliver our services to their customers.” It gives our carrier customers confidence when they are talking to their own customers about performance, resiliency and after-sales support.
“It’s another differentiator that sets us apart”
So, it seems no matter which flavour is best, choice of cloud is just as important as choice of provider.
Get them both right and you just may have it licked…
To learn more about Kandy and its multi-cloud offering, click Contact Us
