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When organizations shop around for a phone survey software solution, the question of where hosting should take place is often a key consideration.
When organizations shop around for a phone survey software solution, the question of where hosting should take place is often a key consideration. When that inquiry comes up, we like to open the discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of both – hosting in the cloud or on premise.
Depending on the organization’s goals, lessening the IT overhead and maintenance for hosting may be an ideal set up. For others, with a dedicated IT team and specific compliance requirements, hosting their survey software and collected data on premise is required. It’s important that organizations make this decision carefully and in an informed manner.
There are certainly many notable benefits for on premise hosting as well! Keep your eyes peeled for an upcoming blog post.
For today, we’ll discuss the ideal hosting option for those requiring a low maintenance option.
What is a cloud hosted phone survey system?
In contrast to keeping all CATI survey technology equipment in office and maintaining the hardware, it is now possible to have your phone survey software (including the CATI dialer) hosted in the cloud in a secure data center.
Guthrie Rebel
Sandler Partners
Benefits of hosting phone survey tools in the cloud
1. Cost
Of course, it almost goes without saying that budget weighs heavily into the decision for hosting software. It depends whether your organizational priorities are to take on capital expenditures or operational expenditures.
For on premise hosting, consider that you must pay up front for the equipment and then the maintenance that follows. With cloud hosting, payment is on a licensing basis as a manageable monthly fee.
2. Flexible & scalable
Being unencumbered by hardware can allow your organization to be more agile, moving with the ebb and flow of business. For example: many of our clients in the polling/elections industry have four or five months of high-volume surveys during election season and, after that peak, they go back to “regular” volume.
Having the ability to easily ramp up your operations and then wind them down as needed is a huge benefit for organizations – regardless of the vertical you work in.
3. Security
When hosting software on premise, organizations need to take careful consideration for things like backup generators or UPS batteries. You should plan to have full redundancies of power, AC, and ample bandwidth to make sure your hosting operations stay safe. It takes a lot of dedicated resources to do so.
Unfortunately, sometimes we have to think the unthinkable. In a natural disaster event leading to power outages or flooding: will your data be compromised? Hosting your software in the cloud means that your data lives in a co-located data center, with full security infrastructure and risk mitigation.
4. Infrastructure
On the topic of cloud infrastructure, data centers have infrastructure stacks that are fully redundant all the way through – firewalls, switches, storage, etc. Storing data safely is their central offering, so you can trust that they think about the details. This keeps business risks and downtime to an all time minimum.
When hosting on premise, anyone can potentially walk into your server room (if proper security measures are not taken, it’s possible that your business has got this covered). With cloud hosting, the only individuals allowed to enter the data center are authorized personnel. So, you know that your information is being treated with the utmost respect.
5. Compliance
In the cloud, data is encrypted at rest. When you collect data on premise, it is your responsibility to ensure data is being treated properly. On premise hosting also requires organizations to do reporting and ensuring compliance for their data processing (for example: SOC2 reports).
The reality of this is that it’s very expensive for companies to do this on their own. In addition to this, we need to consider all the internal framework required to ensure compliance with HIPAA, HITRUST, and other kinds of regulations – which, again, could be already built into your operations, but data centers are experienced in all kinds of compliance.
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