As the needs of your business grows, so do, too, the capabilities of your communication system. The concept and implementation of the “cloud” have unleashed a tremendous amount of possibility and promise. Nemertes Research, an advisory and strategic consulting firm that specializes in analyzing and quantifying the business value of emerging technologies, has released their Q4 summary paper which explains in detail how the cloud can take your business into the future and beyond.

Here’s a quick excerpt:

Selecting the Right Cloud

IT leaders evaluating a move to the cloud are faced with a myriad of choices and service delivery options. Navigating these waters requires a solid understanding of different deployment approaches, the pros and cons of each, and how to evaluate services for their alignment with current and future business needs. The two primary options for cloud are hosted and pure cloud.

– Hosted offerings typically involve a service provider creating a single virtual instance of a platform for each customer, customized to each customer’s particular need. Our research shows that hosted services are the most expensive of all cloud options, and customers are limited by the upgrade cycles of the underlying platform provider.

– Pure cloud offerings are delivered via a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model in which the customer pays a set license fee for each user. Customers sign up for the number of licenses that they need, and all software and hardware (with the possible exception of desktop phones) are provisioned in the cloud. Pure cloud is the least expensive of all cloud delivery models. Nemertes research shows that those using pure-cloud communications services rate their overall collaboration success higher than those using on-premises or hosted platforms.