Building scalable cloud-based communication and collaboration services for SMB enterprises

Cloud-based solutions provide an effective platform for businesses to cut cost, increase scalability, and grow their service offerings. While the viability of this model has been demonstrated by multiple IT services, there has been little work around exploring a similar approach for communication services. in particular, the use of cloud as a platform for voice, data, and video integrated seamlessly, can be an effective solution for delivering next-generation converged services. Further, a cost-effective, self-scaling, cloud-based solution can be a particularly interesting proposition for SMB enterprises that wish to benefit from such communication services. in this paper, we investigate challenges involved in building such a cloud infrastructure and propose virtualization-based approaches to address some of these challenges. © 2011 IEEE.