4 considerations for 3CX in the cloud

Jul 6, 2018 | User Guides

Cloud Considerations

When deploying a new 3CX phone system for your business, you may find that utilising a public cloud provider is the best choice for your business, particularly if you don’t have supported infrastructure already.

Cloud hosting eliminates the need to buy new hardware, making your 3CX deployment a much more cost effective one.

Cloud hosting eliminates the need to buy new hardware, making your 3CX deployment a much more cost effective one.

There are currently 5 public cloud providers which are supported deployment providers by 3CX;

  • Google Cloud Platform3CX cloud providers
  • OVH
  • Amazon Web Services
  • 1&1
  • Azure

While all of these cloud hosting providers have different strengths and benefits, there are a number of factors to consider when deciding which one to choose.

1. Location of available servers

Each supported public cloud provider has specific data centres available for the deployment of a virtual machine. The location of the data centre available will determine the amount of latency between where your Softphones/ desk phones are located and the data centre, and will affect the quality of the call.

It is of great importance that you deploy your virtual machine on a data centre in Australia. The prices are often higher than elsewhere, but the quality of both your calls and videoconferencing will be well worth the price.

2. Size of the virtual machine

The cost of the server in one of the supported public cloud providers is determined by the resources you assign to the virtual machine which you are deploying.

Please see this link to read up on our recommendations on what resources to assign a virtual machine depending on how many concurrent calls you are looking to have for your 3CX installation..

It is important not to assign too few resources because you will suffer in call quality if your server runs out of resources to use, and if your server has too many resources then you are paying for resources the server will most likely never use. If you are using 3CX features such as call recording and web meeting, this adds significant overheads to the resources which the virtual machine will require.

3. Location of company’s cloud resources

If you are already utilising a public cloud provider for other areas of your business, it is recommended that you host your 3CX phone system with the same provider. This will decrease overheads in costs and maintenance of maintaining multiple virtual networks, VPNs and subscriptions with providers.

If the customer or partner currently doesn’t have any resources in the cloud, then have the discussion with the customer about which cloud provider they would decide on if they were to move their workloads to the cloud.

Are they already using Office 365? This may mean in the future they make take advantage of PaaS or IaaS within Azure so it may make the most sense to deploy the 3CX instance there.

4. Is cloud hosting the right option for your business?

Deploying 3CX in the cloud gives some major benefits.

  • You don’t need to maintain the hardware
  • You don’t need to maintain the internet connection
  • Backups of the instance can be configured in a few clicks
  • The hardware the 3CX instance is running on is enterprise grade
  • You can add more resources to the virtual machine very quickly
  • If the onsite internet connection goes down you still have full access to the 3CX instance

However, the cost associated for a small business is sometimes not feasible. The hardware which 3CX can be installed on is relatively inexpensive, and the chance of an issue happening is rather low.

Depending on where the business is at with their cloud adaption, the 3CX Partner can evaluate if the cloud is the best place for you.

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