Unbundle your phone company services to maximize your return on investment - Unified Communications Update

It happens every once in a while in our business. Have you ever had one of those “I can’t believe what I am seeing and hearing” experiences?

A few months ago I was attending a business conference and ended up sitting next to a fellow consultant and friend. While waiting for the presentation to begin, he was working out a project plan for a substantial (7 figure) Unified Communications network deployment. Looking over his shoulder, I commented about the “nice installation”. He turned to me and enthusiastically replied that his client was getting a return on his investment of less than 24 months by utilizing SIP trunks on an upgraded data network. He then proceeded to show me the business analysis that sold his client’s company on a major network system upgrade.

What is SIP?

SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol and is the de-facto signaling standard for real time communications including Voice-over-IP (VoIP). SIP is an open standard which allows the carrier voice network to interoperate seamlessly with customer premise equipment. The logical voice channel established between them is a SIP Trunk.

The SIP protocol allows telecommunications to be efficiently converged onto a data network while maintaining toll or better voice quality. Cisco’s Unified Communications system connects natively to SIP circuits.

At this point I would like to point out that we’re not talking about using a service like Vonage over the Internet for your business telephone system. Those types of products have a “best effort” service level agreement and are usually not appropriate for business use.

Upgrade your data network for a lower cost, more reliable voice network?

Here’s the general idea for a business with multiple locations.

1. You bring in appropriate data circuits from your telco provider to connect all of your business locations (MPLS circuits are ideal).
2. Eliminate all of the local PSTN connections at the remote sites.
3. Port all of your local numbers to a SIP circuit coming into the main office.

Sound like a crazy idea? That’s what I thought when I first looked at the design. But now that we have reviewed and deployed these networks, I have become a SIP deployment evangelist. Because SIP trunks are delivered over existing IP infrastructure, businesses no longer have to purchase and maintain legacy TDM interface cards for delivered voice services. This reduces cost and points of failure. By utilizing a converged IP infrastructure, greater redundancy and uptime can be achieved at a lower cost. If the SIP trunk becomes undeliverable for some reason at the headquarters site, it can immediately and automatically failover to any of the remote sites, providing greater resiliency than is possible with a traditional PSTN configuration.

A key point in the design is to make sure that the data network is constructed using circuits with a service level agreement (SLA), like MPLS. This may appear more expensive than connecting remote offices over an Internet VPN but the additional cost is more than made up by the cost savings from eliminating all of the unneeded PSTN circuits at the remote offices.

If your business has to connect multiple offices and/or uses a substantial amount of long distance service, the return on investment for a Unified Communications System utilizing a combination of SIP trunks and data circuits will be significant.

What your phone company won’t tell you about SIP.

None of the traditional network carriers in Central Florida provide the total solution above. All of the traditional telco companies have some kind of SIP deployment but as of today, they all seem to want to sell it over a dedicated circuit using the same type of rate schedule they have been using for traditional (PRI) voice offerings. And they cannot port local numbers that originate out of the local calling area. This means that if you have an office in say, Houston, that office would not have a local number to call into unless you pay for a physical connection in the Houston office.

At i-Tech, we have been using providers like Broadvox and Triad Telecom for high quality SIP trunks. We work with several regional and national carriers to provide the data networks depending on our clients remote office requirements.

The savings we have anticipated for years is finally here

Many of us have experienced “The Fear” when faced with a revolutionary idea. First, you realize that the concept is so good that you need to initiate it immediately…before everyone else does. Second, you ask yourself, “If it’s such a great idea, why isn’t everyone already doing it?” Then, you tell yourself, “maybe they are and I’m missing the boat!”

I can tell you that this stuff is not bleeding edge technology. It works. It’s simple to deploy. You get a network upgrade that delivers faster and more reliable business applications, data, voice, video at a lower cost.

We are hosting webinars on implementing SIP where we provide a lot more detail and can field specific questions.

If you want to know more, check out our Events page at http://www.i-techsupport.com/newsEvents/events.asp.

Mahalo!

Richard Vaughn
VP - Customer Satisfaction Group
i-Tech Support, Inc.

i-Tech is a Premier Cisco Partner specializing in Unified Communications, Advanced Security and Wireless.

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Tape sucks...iBDR rocks!

I’ve never recommended a secure technology solution as flexible, affordable, and hassle –free one I am writing to you about today. No kidding! So I warn you up front that this post will end with some blatant product promotion… I am shameless, but hopefully there is some worthwhile stuff here that will benefit someone.

For years I have been consulting with our clients about backup and recovery systems for their business networks. It’s not the most exciting product that we provide for i-Tech clients but it’s definitely the most important. As one of our clients, you will have probably heard stuff like this from us at least a hundred times….

Only 6 % of companies suffering catastrophic data loss survive, while 43% never reopen and 51% close within two years. Source: University of Texas

Roughly 70% of all successful attacks on computer networks were carried out by employees and insiders. Source: IDC Market Research

Most of us by now realize the importance of backing up our data. At i-Tech, we have successfully helped countless businesses recover from the potential disaster of lost business data when the inevitable has happened. But I will let you in on a not-so-secret statistic about the technology we have all been using to protect our businesses:

Over half of tape backups fail in some manner, so chances are that if you need to restore from tape, you’ll be out of luck.

There are a lot of reasons for the unreliability of tape backups. Tape, in contrast to disk, is physically delicate and easily compromised by environmental factors such as heat, humidity, and magnetic interference. Moreover, tape cartridges must be replaced frequently (every 6-12 months). Even when magnetic tape backups are successful, tapes themselves are subject to loss or theft, and may be in the possession of an employee or vendor unable to reach a recovery site. And there is the story going around about the receptionist that inserted the cleaning cartridge into the tape drive instead of a tape, leaving the company with no backup whatsoever.

A Clear Difference
In the last year or so all of us have been really excited to work on a new, better technology solution for our clients. iBDR is both a service and a network appliance. Its Network Attached Storage (NAS) backs up all of your servers with no user or administrative interaction. iBDR also includes our online data vaulting services, streaming your data to our secure network operations center for ultimate security for your business data.

iBDR is i-Tech tested and proven – the ideal system for Business Disaster Recovery for Small and Medium sized businesses.

iBDR gives you frequent on site backups, on-site virtual server, remote storage, disaster recovery in the event of disaster and 24x7 management of the entire process is bundled at a price that is comparable to the overall cost of buying and managing tape backup.

Benefits of iBDR

Affordable
• Offers offsite storage at an affordable cost
• Provides a low cost, speedy disaster recovery process.

Secure
• Data is encrypted so it is not accessible to anyone, either on the iBDR appliance or at the remote storage facility without the passkey.

Hassle-free
• Eliminates the cost and time of managing on-site tape backup. We monitor and manage the entire process.
• Allows near real-time backups-as frequent as every 15 minutes.


Flexible
• Virtual Server technology completely eliminates any recovery downtime. If any of your servers fail, our server virtualization technology embedded in the Network Attached Storage (NAS) allows customer servers and applications to be restored and rebooted in less than 30 minutes in most cases.

The iBDR-1 version (accommodates up to 5 servers and 1 TB of data) is only $249 per month - comparable in cost to deploying a new tape drive.

Here is what the engineers say about the iBDR… And this guy is an engineer, not even a salesperson!

“The iBDR is at least twice as secure, three times as fast and at least one hundred times more hassle-free than any tape backup system.”

We have a trial program set up if you are interested – call me or email me for more info.

Mahalo!
Richard Vaughn
VP - Customer Satisfaction Group
i-Tech Support, Inc.

The iBDR is a part of the Total Technology Services program from i-Tech.