One of the reasons Asterisk has taken such a large share of the telephony market is the ease of deploying it on commodity hardware with free, Open Source operating systems. Commoditizing hardware and simplifying its deployment has been a key factor in the widespread adoption of the Cloud as a business concept. This makes the Cloud an ideal target for deployment of Asterisk-based contact center software. However, requirements such as long-term storage of recordings or data have complicated the picture. Once again, the Cloud offers a solution. Services such as Amazon S3 provide a widely-available interface for the long-term storage of recordings while providing easy access when required. Amazon RDS, their database offering, puts the headache of tuning and configuring the database server back in the hands of Amazon.
Contact centers who have moved to the Cloud are demanding long-term storage of recordings while demanding ready access in case calls need to be audited or verified. Amazon’s S3 libraries are available for a variety of platforms, and provide an easy way for the Indosoft Q-Suite contact center software to move recordings off the server while maintaining ready access through the familiar interface users have come to rely on. A contact center no longer has to allocate large amounts of permanent storage to their Asterisk servers, nor does it need to endure the expense of maintaining storage capacity that has not yet been used. Amazon is not alone in this, other providers also provide access to long-term storage with easy to use interfaces.
Among the benefits of Cloud-based contact center ACD is the ability to add and remove servers as required. This does introduce the problem of correctly allocating resources to the database server. Contact center software such as Q-Suite is highly reliant on a dependable, responsive database. Adding users and servers increases the resources required, and often some tuning is required to determine the optimal configuration. When hosting the database on its own server, this can require moving the data from instance to instance while the right processor and memory parameters are determined. This can result in paying for a system that is over-powered in some regards or the risk of under-performance. Amazon RDS provides the same database interface the contact center software expects, but in a more easily configurable way. The availability of replication and redundancy options that can be configured through the provider, rather than at the server level, dramatically reduce the effort of implementing those options. This makes the Cloud an even better choice for those demanding reliability and scalability while to save time and effort of deployment.
With so many providers offering commodity hardware via the Cloud, providers are forced to innovate in order to differentiate their offerings from the alternatives. By leveraging their size and providing simple to use APIs for services like S3 and RDS, Amazon is staying ahead of the curve. This is a boon to contact centers who can leverage Asterisk, the Cloud and Asterisk based contact center software to ease deployment and save money while meeting the requirements of their clients.