Jive Exec Explains How a True Cloud Multi-Tenant Architecture Drives Business Success
The cloud as a whole has revolutionized the information technology landscape, giving IT teams and organizations a way to gain easy access to a vast amount of resources and real-time data. Through cloud-based technologies, companies can respond quickly to opportunities, deploy a plethora of applications, and scale at will to meet ever-evolving customer needs or company growth.
Because the cloud is no longer just a trend and instead a necessity to stay afloat in today’s business world, more and more businesses are moving to cloud services at a rapid rate. The benefits of a cloud-based phone system or a Unified Communications (UC) solution are readily apparent, offering scalability, flexibility, and mobility. To support this, what service providers must do is ensure that their security protects the consumers of these services, and also offer a support that is of the highest quality, ever maintaining the five-nines.
A trusted provider of UC and hosted Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) solutions, Jive Communications understands the challenges of cloud adoption and the importance of quality cloud services., With this in mind, Jive has pursued and developed a true cloud multi-tenant architecture to help businesses enjoy a secure, reliable, and extensible solution that enables them to spend less and to get more from their cloud applications.
Sterling Snow, the Marketing Communications Director at Jive Communications, spoke with VoipReview to discuss the difference in cloud models and explains how a true cloud multi-tenant architecture can power businesses through performance advantages.
Understanding the Different Types of Cloud Service Architecture
The cloud has developed and grown to become a dominant part of computing infrastructure for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) as well as large enterprises. A recently published report by McAfee, Building Trust in a Cloudy Sky: The State of Cloud Adoption and Security, revealed that approximately 80 percent of all information technology (IT) budgets will be committed to cloud apps and solutions within the next 15 months. Given this staggering statistic, it is apparent that more businesses are accelerating their adoption of different cloud models and increasing their spending for cloud technologies.
As today’s modern organizations embrace the power of the cloud to enhance business efficiency, they need to decide on the type of model that works best for their business. That is why it is important for businesses to first understand the various cloud configurations. By learning the difference between public, private, and hybrid cloud services, an organization can easily identify the most appropriate solution for their specific industry or business needs.
- Public Cloud. Data and/or applications are stored on shared servers at third-party providers that deliver a variety of cloud solutions to their clients. This cloud model is available to the general public. The benefits of public clouds include utility pricing, elasticity, and core competency.
- Private Cloud. This cloud infrastructure is hosted within an organization’s firewall and/or managed by the organization or a third party, and may exist on-premises or off-premises.
- Hybrid Cloud. A cloud infrastructure that combines both public and private clouds, which remain unique entities but are bound by standardized or proprietary technology that allows data and application portability.
Apart from understanding these various cloud models, organizations should also consider the different cloud service models such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to help their customer base simplify maintenance and support, improve business efficiency, ensure high-quality utilization of resources, and cut costs.
So how can service providers and software vendors harness the power of SaaS and IaaS? The answer lies in leveraging a true cloud multi-tenant system.
The Benefits of Using a Multi-tenant Cloud System
Multi-tenant cloud systems offer many benefits for service providers and their respective customer bases. A multi-tenant system allows organizations to support hundreds (or even thousands) of applications and installations while running on the same operating system and using the same hardware and data storage mechanisms.
Some major advantages of using a true multi-tenant cloud application include:
- Cost-savings. With a true multi-tenant system, service providers can reduce service costs because no new software resources are required for each incremental customer. Plus, the operation costs are lessened due to the fact that the application upgrades can be applied to all tenants or can be run on a single software instance, so only one license needs to be purchased. And with a multi-tenant cloud architecture, the higher the degree of multitenancy (meaning the more a service provider's infrastructure and resources are shared), the lower the costs for the users.
- Scalability. Multi-tenant cloud architecture makes it easy to increase the capacity of adding new hardware into the platform. Users can simply plug additional hardware into the different elements contained within the same technology stack, and then the total capacity of the entire environment increases and becomes more scalable not just for a single user but to the entire user base.
- Efficiency. When compared to a single tenant environment, a multi-tenant architecture allows users to maximize the performance of various elements in the technology stack, ensuring optimum speed and reliability at all times. Additionally, it allows multi-tenant SaaS vendors to deliver more effective service when it comes to troubleshooting and solving problems within the system.
Enhancing Business Efficiency with Jive’s True Cloud Multi-tenant Architecture
In order to differentiate themselves in the growing cloud solutions market, service providers and software vendors are modifying their applications to meet the changing needs of their customers. But without using a true cloud-based multi-tenant architecture, service providers and vendors simply cannot deliver on the real promises of cloud computing (included, but not limited to agility, flexibility, scalability, and cost-savings). As a leading provider of Unified Communications (UC) and hosted Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) solutions, Jive Communications is built on a true cloud architecture that allows them to have more peer-to-peer traffic and higher voice quality as well as to help organizations mitigate risks and enhance the reliability and redundancy using a multi-cloud approach.
“Most Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and hosted VoIP providers are using a Primary/Secondary setup, with one large East Coast data center and one large West Coast data center,” said Snow. “With Jive, we are committed to a true cloud architecture and have been since day one. It's what has allowed us to handle mid-market and enterprise clients years before our competitors."
According to Snow, customers will benefit from Jive’s true cloud architecture for many reasons. “Our true cloud architecture enables Jive's service-level agreement (SLA) to be incredibly high," said Snow. "Having more geographically dispersed data centers allows us to take the risk out of the cloud." Plus, Jive’s true cloud architecture also ensures four-nines uptime (the service availability standard for hardware and key system in the telecom industry), which can be achieved when the downtime is less than 5.26 minutes per year. "The redundancy across multiple data centers leads to 99.999% uptime," shared Snow. "Updates are pushed in real time, thus ensuring that customers have bleeding edge tech and features.”
Additionally, the multi-tenant system also supports both SMBs and enterprises on the same network. “Jive’s cloud multi-tenant solution allows us to grow rapidly and address the cloud migration across different business sizes,” shared Snow. “Unlike our competitors, we aren't faced with the decision to be strong in the SMB space or in the enterprise space. We are a leader in both.”
Aside from bringing the five-nines uptime and offering competitive intelligence to help improve operations for SMBs, Jive’s Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) allows businesses to leverage real-time communications via a web browser or through a mobile application. These real-time communications include video, peer-to-peer voice, chat, file-sharing, and other data-sharing functions. “WebRTC is removing the annoying plugins and extensions and allowing voice and video calls to be made directly from the browser,” said Snow. “Imagine businesses having a support center right from the website with live screen share. By using Jive, every business will benefit from WebRTC technology.” Given all of these benefits, it’s not surprising that WebRTC is fast becoming a popular tool for business communications.
For further information about Jive’s cloud-based multi-tenant system and other comprehensive communications solutions, visit Jive Communications’ website.
About Jive Communications
Jive Communications is a trusted provider of enterprise-grade UC and hosted VoIP solutions in the market. Founded in 2006, the company has been providing SMBs with cutting-edge communications solutions that include voice, video, mobile applications, and contact center software solutions that run on Jive Cloud. Jive was recently listed as a "company likely to reach a billion dollars" by Forbes, validating the technology, business approach, and architecture of Jive.