5 Things Your Cloud VoIP Provider Won't Tell You

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Shopping for a cloud-based voice over IP (VoIP) provider brings with it a flurry of marketing collateral, buzzwords, and vendor promises. You need to approach the selection of a cloud VoIP provider just as you would any other major technology platform you want to integrate into your business. Here are five things your cloud VoIP provider won’t tell you.

1. We Are Part of the Commodity, Not the Solution 

Prior to shopping for enterprise-grade hosted VoIP solutions, I can’t emphasize enough the importance of doing your upfront work and analyzing your requirements. As cloud VoIP grows, the “me, too” vendors most likely will not be around for the long haul or be able to support the evolving technical requirements that enterprises are now seeking. Therefore, you need to rule out the commodity VoIP vendors early in the selection cycle by using a combination of the following tactics:

• Know your business and technology requirements for cloud VoIP in your enterprise.
• Research cloud VoIP vendors online.
• Seek out customer references for cloud VoIP providers you are considering.
• Know your current office billing costs and trends for the past 12–18 months.

The ShoreTel website even goes as far as to say choose a partner, not a cheap vendor. That’s another good bit of advice to follow when choosing a cloud VoIP vendor.

2. Our Cloud VoIP Solution May Not Work Well with Your Corporate Firewall and End Point Security

When considering a cloud VoIP solution for your enterprise, it’s prudent to drill down and analyze any potential issues you might encounter between your current network and end point security and the prospective cloud VoIP platform. Make security a major section in your cloud VoIP platform requirements, and take the extra time to ask security-related questions about the vendors’ platform; seek reference clients who are in your same industry and running similar network and end point security.

3. We Hand Off Our Voice Traffic to the Public Internet as Fast as We Can

 Hosted VoIP providers may have a great call quality experience during the sales and pilot cycles but quickly shift customer calls off to the public Internet, where call quality takes a dive. A MegaPath white paper entitled Top 5 Considerations in Choosing a Hosted VoIP Provider recommends looking for the following quality indicators in a prospective VoIP provider:

• Business-class access that bases the bandwidth of the circuit on the call quantity, codec used, and bandwidth for data traffic
• A private, secure, multiple-protocol label switching network carrying voice traffic on the VoIP provider’s private network to guarantee bidirectional call quality
• Quality of service (QoS), with dynamic bandwidth allocation to guarantee high-level QoS through prioritizing voice over data traffic

4. Our Disaster Recovery Site is in the Same Geographic Area

Although there are no accepted VoIP provider practices for locating a disaster recovery (DR) site, you want to ask questions about the geographic location of your prospective cloud VoIP provider’s DR sites. A DR site in the same geographic area, on the same power grid, much less relying on the same Internet provider, may not do much good when a natural disaster or other calamity strikes.

5. Our Services Team is Contracted Out to a Third Party

The effective implementation, troubleshooting, maintenance, and management of cloud VoIP require a dedicated professional services team, despite advancements in cloud technologies. Overdependence on contractors to support such a mission-critical platform as VoIP telephony can lead to continuity, turnover, and other issues around the availability of appropriately skilled staff to manage customer VoIP platforms.

Dealing with Cloud VoIP Vendors 101

Much like any other enterprise technology change, shopping for a cloud VoIP platform requires doing your upfront research—above all, analyzing and documenting your business and technical requirements so that you control the vendor conversations without wasting time during the vendor-selection process.