Companies are moving from the legacy Key Phone System (KTS) and on-premises PABX (Private Automated Branch Exchange) to cloud based PBX. Let’s take a look on the simple concept of how this digital transformation can be done.

A – this is the center of our discussion which is the cloud PBX itself. There are various soft switch available, but for the purpose of this simple concept let’s pick Asterisk which is open source and also 3CX which is available free for minimum usage.

The soft switch either Asterisk or 3CX is to be installed on a virtual machine (VM). It can be your local on-premises VM, but for the sake of getting reliable VM, let’s host it on platform offered by some reliable providers such as Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Alibaba Cloud or Malaysian own cloud provider – TM One Azure Stack.

B – SIP account providers are whose you want to seek for the purpose of buying call minutes. Why you need this? Actually it is an option, you may just use your own voice gateway for call minutes, but SIP accounts offer benefits in term of lower cost for long distance calling, of course it will still depends on locations where the calls are terminated, and also various call rates by various providers.

C – voice gateway can be a gateway to your PSTN provider such as Telekom Malaysia or GSM gateway. If you are using Telekom Malaysia, this gateway will be connected to your phone lines known as Direct Exchange Line (DEL), Basic Rate ISDN (BRI) or Primary Rate ISDN (PRI). For GSM gateway, it is just a simple box containing few sim card slots, or another gateway to sim banks.

D – IP phones just normal SIP phones connected to your network via wired or wireless. It should be on good internet connection. The parameters that need to be taken care here are username, password and SIP server (which is in fact your cloud PBX server address).

E– soft phone are just another SIP phones, the only different it is just an app running on windows machine, iOS or Android.

F – mobile users are employees who are outside of your office LAN but connected to internet. They should be able to connect to cloud PBX using the allocated username and password.

By having this simple setup, you should be able to achieve the following objectives:

1. Free calls between employees whether they are in the office, or far away roaming to different countries, as long as they are connected to internet.
2. Mobile users roaming to oversea should be able to make free calls to the office, and local calls to customers residing in Malaysia. They use the same voice gateway or sip accounts.
3. Cost savings in term of long distance calling and also on the investment for new IP PABX.
4. No need of physical PBX in the office – it’s all in cloud.
5. Possibly to get rid of all hard phones for more cost savings and make use of the free soft phone apps.
6. Easy maintenance for the PBX, quick updates.
7. Free calls between office branches no matter where they are.
8. Centralized PBX for all branches – wonder how much you can save on this?

Okay that’s my simple concept on cloud PBX. Drop me a message if you think I can be of a help little further.