What is UCaaS? An Overview of Cloud Based Unified Communications
What is unified communications (UC)?
Unified communication, better known as UC, includes any of the following forms of online communication:
- Video & web conferencing
- Voice
- Chat/instant message
- Collaboration
- Screenshare
What is unified communication as a service (UCaaS)? UCaaS is the cloud model of handling communication across a variety of different mediums e.g. audio, video, chat etc. This model has a strong appeal because it allows a company to avoid having to deploy an on-premise solution for UC and instead utilize a cloud-based software solution.
More and more businesses are choosing to go this route because it is simple, affordable and can scale rapidly.
What types of UCaaS are available? Depending on the needs of an enterprise, there are two forms of UCaaS that you might go with: single-tenancy and multi-tenancy.
Single tenancy can integrate with an on-premise setup and is considered a more secure deployment of UCaaS. With single tenancy, one instance of the UC software serves an individual customer in an individual database. Put differently, with single tenancy, multiple customers do not share the same database and are not all available in a single (and more vulnerable) access point.
By contrast, multi-tenant architectures and softwares represent the opposing scenario where one software instance represents many UC customers. Multi-tenancy is the more affordable option but requires that multiple customers are loaded into the same database and thus are more vulnerable to a security breach.
What are the pros and cons of UCaaS? The pros of a UCaaS setup are fairly simple as delivering your UC environment this way allows a fast and affordable setup that can scale quickly and cost-effectively. Additional benefits, as with most cloud applications, are that the software requires less overhead and maintenance since it’s being handled by a third party.
The con of UCaaS is that it can be less secure than a sophisticated on-premise solution. For example, a healthcare organization may have such sensitive UC data that it cannot afford to operate completely in the cloud. In these cases, many enterprises will choose a hybrid solution or a completely on-premise option as a means of maximizing security.
Brookside is a local Austin based cloud consultant for unified communications & collaboration as well as the latest omni-channel contact center solutions for all sizes of clients. Let us help you communicate and collaborate like never before with the latest unified communications solutions from the top companies in this space.
Contact Mike Dance at [email protected].