More Large Enterprises Starting to 'Get' the Benefits of the Cloud

Cloud-based contact centers have become popular with smaller companies for a number of reasons. They’re more affordable, don’t require in-house IT resources and provide small companies with features they wouldn’t normally be able to afford, such as 100 percent call recording, data analytics and speech technology. It was conventional wisdom for years that the cloud was for the SMB (small to medium-sized) business market, since large enterprises have the money and resources to maintain premise-based equipment, and most of them continued to do just that.

That said, there are many reasons to question this conventional wisdom. Large enterprises often have call centers distributed all over a region, a country or the world, and using a cloud-based contact center solution (think workforce management for the sake of example) allows them to share human resources between locations rather than be forced to make do with the people in each physical location.

In addition, a cloud-based workforce management solution makes it possible for companies of any size to scale IT quickly and efficiently, and to quickly make changes without business interruption, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo. Even large enterprises don’t have unlimited IT budgets, and going with a patchwork approach of multiple premise-based installations means spending a lot of time and money troubleshooting problems and doing routine maintenance, something that hosted solutions providers take off their clients’ hands.  Large enterprises need to remember that quality must come first in customer support, and the errors, delays and troubleshooting required in most premise-based solutions aren’t doing their customers any favors.

In the case of some large enterprises, the hesitancy for cloud-based solutions has been a perception of poor security. Many companies have been burned by data losses in recent years, and cloud-based solutions are often discusses as if they are inherently less secure.  But are they?

“The answer is an unequivocal ‘no,’” according to Ciarlo. “The evolution of cloud solutions and cloud security has reached a point where their convenience and cost-saving benefits can now be shared by enterprises with thousands of agents.” He notes that the success of Salesforce.com (News - Alert) offers additional evidence that larger-scale enterprises can make the transition with confidence.

It seems that larger enterprises are getting the message about the benefits of the cloud and the lack of risk. Research from Gartner (News - Alert) predicts that 50 percent of large companies will have hybrid cloud deployments in place by 2017.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi