Similarly to IT infrastructure, collaboration and UC solutions are growing increasingly complicated. Businesses are turning towards the cloud as a simpler outsourcing solution, but moving UC into the cloud can seem risky to many enterprises in need of secure, reliable communication and collaboration.
As new vendors and service providers turn towards the cloud, countless UCaaS solutions are emerging. While some providers are offering real multi-tenant UC, others are looking at traditional, static, and hosted UC services.
The Segregated UC Environment
The world of hosted UC offers a somewhat segregated environment, where each enterprise comes with its own networking capacity and physical infrastructure for running UC applications. Enterprises need to move their current solutions into someone else's data centre in hosted models. However, in a multi-tenant UC cloud environment, enterprises can compute networking resources, capacity, and UC application instances with various other consumers within a data centre. Though this service delivery option is cheaper than most hosted UC, businesses won't have as much room to modify applications.
Regardless of whether providers are offering access to hosted UCaaS or multi-tenant solutions, enterprises are being forced to think more carefully about scalable, and reliable collaboration tools. IT organisations need to understand the delivery model of a provider before assessing each service option.
Multi-Tenant and Hosted UCaaS: What Can Providers Give?
UC vendors either sell their products through network service providers or cloud providers who re-sell UCaaS to enterprises. Though this model is attractive to smaller companies for its versatile pricing, many enterprises worry about service reliability. Some industries won't have a choice regarding which model they use. For instance, health and finance companies often choose hosted environments in which their data can be physically separated on specific infrastructures within the providers' data centres, offering greater security.
Regardless of whether it's hosted, or multi-tenant, the underlying UCaaS service should be indistinguishable to end users.
