Navigating the Cloud: Best Practices & Successes

There is a major transition in communications today due to the evolution of the Internet.   There is also a lot of confusion as well.   VoIP (Voice over IP) is positioned by many service providers as being able to work anytime and anyplace.  Unfortunately this is not the case if there is not built on a solid foundation of a WAN from end to end.  Voice is very delay sensitive and sending it on the open Internet as opposed to a well engineered network using “Internet Protocol” can result in voice service that works great sometimes and not very well at others.  I have been in the business for 10 years now and have seen this happen over and over again. Unfortunately business customers with little technical background get caught in the middle and have bad experiences by focusing only cost savings not considering quality. This results in switching carriers and phone system providers in order to try and solve the problem.  If you are going to deploy a VoIP phone solution make sure that you are getting a solid WAN foundation with a well engineered WAN to provide a long term solution from end to end.   It's best to look for  VoIP service providers who offers both managed WAN and  managed VoIP to get the best results.   This is best found by companies with a Data Center who offers managed servers hosting and can monitor services 24/7.