Cloud Computing: A Revolution for Contact Centers
27 Jan, 2012
By: Marc WildnerThe latest trend in the contact center business is Cloud computing. And it is no longer just a concept. In fact, it's being adopted rapidly by some of the biggest and most trusted companies in the world. Leading Cloud computing providers like Amazon, Google, Verizon, Microsoft and many more are investing a huge amount of money for new high-performance data centers.
With Cloud computing, companies can benefit from infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) technologies for their contact centers.
Comparison with Traditional Solutions
The days of long deployment cycles, huge capital investments and costly support contracts are history. Cloud computing provides access to capacity and software via a standard Web browser, so you can rapidly generate high value from mission-critical enterprise applications with little or no upfront capital investment.
Traditional, enterprise contact-center software solutions require a significant investment in premise-based hardware, databases, middleware, applications and software licenses, as well as the hiring of large IT teams to support integration, configuration and administration.
Cloud computing provides a highly flexible, usage-based pricing model for services rendered, so businesses can scale up or down as needed to efficiently manage unpredictable call volumes. The contact center only pays for infrastructure and capacity that are actually used.
Deployment of Cloud Solutions
Unlike on-premise infrastructure that often takes months to integrate and deploy, the Cloud contact center platform can be deployed in days. Its core purpose involves launching new products, media campaigns and promotions with a contact center solution configured to seamlessly handle personalized customer interactions.
With traditional, premise-based contact center software, you must wait for software updates and invest significantly, and repeatedly, in resources to upgrade hardware and software. Using a Cloud-based solution, all upgrades are automatic and transparent to your business. You continuously benefit from the latest innovations at no additional risk or cost.
Because the contact center platform is delivered via the Web, administrators and end users have full access to functionality at all times, regardless of where they are located.
What about data security? In a Cloud deployment, all critical data is stored in a secure, off-site data center. Most corporate IT departments are typically pulled in many directions and find it challenging to keep up with the latest in network and physical security strategies. In a Cloud deployment, data security represents a core component of the SaaS providers offering, so customers can rest assured that their data is almost certainly better protected than in a client server environment.
Cloud Computing Risks
The data in Cloud computing is controlled by the provider who also becomes responsible for your business continuity and disaster recovery. Companies should determine in advance how to migrate their data when changing the Cloud provider, or, even worse, what to do if the provider goes out of business.
For this reason, Cloud computing must still become more secure and transparent to convince users to trust their business-critical applications in the Cloud.
