Here at Coolhead Tech, we like to cover the latest and greatest in cloud and workplace technology advancements. Today, this means we'll be sharing a whitepaper with you, from our friends at IHS Infonetics. This whitepaper discusses how businesses manage to improve their productivity with cloud-based applications and unified communications. We'll discuss three key points from the whitepaper in this blog post, and if they interest you, we'll link to the full whitepaper at the end so you can dive in.

Key Criteria In Evaluating Cloud Solutions

When evaulating different cloud providers, there are four key points of criteria to judge them by. They come in the following order of importance:

1. Security Levels. How secure is your data? Cloud services are hosted in external servers, often data centers. Is this place secured physically with security card access and proper surveillance? Is the encryption on the servers strong enough to prevent people from breaking in and looking at your data?
   
   
2. Quality of Service. How dependable is the service? Does it suffer from regular downtime, or slow speeds? Hosted solutions have to be up as close to 24/7 as possible, and should be as fast as your Internet connection allows. Quality of service guarantees are key.
   
   
3. Support. What happens when something goes wrong? Is there a 24/7 support hotline your business and your employees can contact? Is on-site support available? These are all questions you should ask yourself when starting with a cloud provider.
   
   
4. Pricing. Finally, how much does it cost? Paying a premium over other providers is fine if they score high across the board in these categories, but compare pricing carefully between providers with high scores. Ignore expensive solutions with low scores entirely, as well as cheap solutions in the middle of the road. You want only the best for your business.

Understanding the importance of these three criteria will help you choose the best provider, and enjoy the productivity gains that come with cloud-powered unified communications.

Trends In Cloud Communications

The benefits of the cloud and unified communications are quickly becoming apparent to the world of business. From a survey conducted in March of last year (2015), more than 50% of businesses had at least some part of their unified communications in a public or private cloud. On-premises remains relevant in 2016, but is slowly fading to the next big step in business communications- and for good reason!

Gains From Integrating Communications With Your Business Apps

Business applications are a wide spectrum, but in this context we're speaking mostly of suites like Office 365 and Google for Work, as well as cloud storage solutions like Dropbox and cloud communication solutions like RingCentral. Businesses are integrating cloud voice solutions with their main applications, putting SaaS solutions that support unified communications as a top priority for most businesses. According to a March 2015 survey of businesses based in North America, a whopping 79% agreed that integrating voice with their business applications was "very important".

Unified communications are considered good on their own, but the modern business also wants them integrated with all of their business applications. This includes everything from an office app to an address book.

Maximizing The Power Of The Cloud

To learn more about maximizing the power of the cloud for businesses, you should read IHS Infonetics' full whitepaper here.

Here at Coolhead Tech, we cover all kinds of cloud and enterprise solutions. You can browse our blog for more informative posts like these, on Google Apps, RingCentral and more. If you're based in or around Austin, Texas, you can also contact us for a free consultation.