Azaleos Survey: The Growth of Public Cloud Unified Communications is Sluggish

Azaloes Corporation, a managed messaging, collaboration and unified communications Services Company, has revealed the results of a survey on the cloud adoption plans of mid-to-large enterprises for unified communications (UC) services.

According to a press release, out the organizations not currently using a public cloud-based UC service, only 10 percent plan to deploy such a service within the next year, citing concerns over loss of customization, uptime, and security.

For the organizations that cannot or would not deploy public cloud-based UC services, 48 percent said they would deploy a private cloud as an alternative. One-third of the respondents said that they would choose Microsoft (News - Alert) Office 365 as a public-cloud UC provider.

“This research revealed that larger organizations are interested in the benefits associated with public cloud Unified Communications (News - Alert) -- namely reduced management overhead, predictable cost of ownership, and simpler migration to new services -- but are concerned about customization, uptime, and security,” said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research, Inc. “We were surprised to learn that among organizations that said they could not or would not deploy public cloud-based UC services, nearly one third indicated that if hybrid cloud UC solutions were available they would migrate within the next 12 months.”

The survey found that the majority of enterprises will continue to deploy UC (hosted Exchange e-mail, calendaring and scheduling, voice/telephony, presence, Web conferencing, etc.) in on-premise and/or private-cloud infrastructures over the next several years. Private cloud solutions are kept about as beneficial as public cloud services, but are considered to provide better protection from malware, as well as perimeter security and data integrity.

Scott Gode, vice president of product management and marketing for Azaleos, said, “However, the survey did reveal that many decision makers view private cloud UC infrastructures as superior to public cloud options, based largely on their robust customization, flexibility, and more mature security benefits.”