Hosted PBX, Virtual PBX or Cloud PBX?

Hosted PBX, Virtual PBX or Cloud PBX?

With the roll out of NBN and the decommissioning of traditional business phone lines, eventually every business will have to change over to IP telephony. Apart from migrating their existing phone lines to business VoIP, they will also have to upgrade their phone system. And one of the more popular choices is a cloud based hosted PBX system.

There are a lot of terms being thrown around when describing this new age PBX technology. But in the end, there is only one way to deliver a cloud based phone system.

Difference Between Virtual, Hosted and Cloud PBX 

In short, the terms Hosted PBX, Cloud PBX and Virtual PBX generally all represent the same service and mean pretty much the same thing. As internet evolved over the years, new terminology appeared and became the ‘newest’ way of describing the technology.

Virtual PBX

The term originates from virtual computing which allows users to access software applications remotely and using the internet. As virtual PBX is essentially a piece of software housed in a data centre and the users access it via internet, it's a form of virtual computing.

Cloud PBX

The term cloud is just a metaphor for the internet. It originated from the various flowcharts that were drawn by IT professionals where a cloud represented www or the internet. Cloud PBX is also a form of cloud computing where a software program, being the PBX, is accessed over the internet.

Hosted PBX

The term hosted is also widely used when describing the service. Just like virtual and cloud, hosted PBX is a means of deploying the service via the internet and the PBX software is hosted off premise by a provider. It means there is a service provider that hosts the PBX software off premise, and is responsible for deploying the service to be accessed via the internet.

Whether it's called cloud, virtual or hosted, this replacement for the traditional PBX will continue to reshape the telephone system industry and provide fantastic benefits to businesses of all sizes. In Australia, hosted PBX services taken up by SME businesses are projected to grow exponentially in the years to come. It's expected that cloud based systems will eventually overtake the use of traditional and on premise PBX systems.

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