The five-minute fix for your collaboration challenge

Do you need to control all aspects of your organization’s data and technology systems? Do you have the financial resources to buy a complete in-house collaboration platform? Do you have the staff to manage the back-end details for system configuration and management? Questions like these are crucial when it comes to deciding the optimal collaboration platform for your company.

Those lines of inquiry form the basis of a new Allstream infographic that walks you through the process of selecting the right collaboration technology set-up for your business. Follow the image’s logical decision tree to figure out if your organization should consider running an on-premise, internally managed communications system — or whether an outsourced, cloud-based system makes more sense.

Perhaps like many, your company is somewhere between those two poles, in which case a hybrid platform could be the answer. Hybrid solutions combine on-premise and cloud-based products in ways that best suit different businesses.

Organizations increasingly face tough choices among equally viable architectures. Communications technology systems have grown more sophisticated and complex over the past five years, incorporating voice, messaging, videoconferencing and document sharing to a much greater degree than earlier models ever did.

Although a business may want to use the latest and greatest solution, its staff may not have the know-how to manage the technology on-premise. Certainly the upfront costs and ongoing maintenance requirements of in-house collaboration system management prove too much for some. Yet for others, the need to maintain data and applications on premises trump any other factor.

Clearly, different types of organizations benefit from different kinds of collaboration technology models. To make the right choice, check out the infographic, answer the questions and see which framework is the best fit for your organization.

Here’s the link to the infographic again, just in case.

Illustration by Mark Glucki