Every company needs a phone system, but not every company wants the responsibility of owning and maintaining a VoIP or PBX solution in-house. For those businesses, hosted options let you move your phone system offsite but still get the features you want. However, you need to do your research upfront and compare vendors to make sure you get reliable service and access to expert support as you need it.
Hosted vs. In-House
Darin Stahl, senior director at Info-Tech Research Group, says the differences between in-house and hosted VoIP/ PBX are the same as when you move any workload into a hosted or cloud environment. You essentially take services off-premises to a third-party provider and let them handle much of the responsibility.
The major benefits are that you don’t have to think as much about network issues, especially when you want to embrace unified communications (UC). “If I try to put VoIP and UC on my internal network, all of a sudden I have to carve out bandwidth and worry about quality of service,” Stahl says. “Do I really need to bother with that as an IT guy? Why can’t I just make all of that go away? Hosted makes it disappear. You still have to manage the vendor, but it’s not something your techs have to worry about.”