SD-WAN is Your Super LAN

By: John Shepler

Are you caught in the great cloud migration? You can almost hear the giant sucking sound of racks and servers being vacuumed up and sent packing to remote data centers. OK, that’s a little dramatic. Even so, the trend of moving more and more telecom and IT functions from in-house to cloud providers is clear. The problem is how to reconnect over vast distances as efficiently as you could with a few hundred feet of Cat6 cable.

The New Internet is SO Much Bigger
The Internet we became comfortable with starting in the mid 90’s is an electronic text messaging system and distributed library of text and images, accessible from anywhere. That has been expanded, of course, to include video content and e-commerce. Even with 20 years of improvements, the traditional Internet experience hasn’t changed that much. You still access what you want through an email client or Web browser. It’s the next morphing of the Internet that makes it so much more comprehensive. This is the expansion of Internet functions to include remote applications and their associated databases, and unified communications in place of the venerable office phone.

The Cloud is a Huge Data Center… But You Can’t See It
There’s really nothing magical or even spooky about “the cloud”. It’s just a metaphor for an enormous data center well beyond your line of sight. Inside the cloud are probably servers, storage drives, routers, switches and miles of cable similar to what you used to have. It’s just the scale that is so jaw dropping. The cost savings that is driving this change of IT operations is due to the multi-tenant nature of clouds. You and a hundred or a thousand of your best friends and total strangers are sharing the same facilities and divvying up the costs.

Where the Internet Goes Horribly Wrong
What we’ll call the legacy Internet is a network of incrementally increasing speed. It mirrors the evolution of the PC. How much have we shelled out over the years to get higher and higher MHz processors, then more and more cores, Kilobytes… Megabytes… and now Gigabytes of RAM, and similar storage capacity that is now in the Terabytes? Similarly, Internet access has gone from a few Kbps dial-up to X.25 connections to DSL, T1 lines, DS3, Cable Broadband, SONET Fiber Optics and now Gigabit Ethernet, 10 GigE and even 100 GigE. You may need some or all of this capacity to support your growing functions in the cloud, but can you afford it?

The problem with your traditional Internet access is that it evolved in parallel with the traditional Internet services. What’s happened with this cloud paradigm is that there has been a step-change in functionality without a corresponding step-change in connectivity. If you try and move your phones to hosted PBX and your applications to Software as a Service over the same old Internet connection, you can find yourself with an office that hardly functions at all. Voice communications are choppy and even dropped. Video tears up and stops. Your apps still work, but it seems to take forever to get a response from the system. Worst case, you could rue the day you ever tried to save a buck with all this new technology.

Can You Put Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again?
It IS possible to get back to the time where everything worked seamlessly and the systems were invisible to everyone using them. Employees want appliances to do their jobs, not finicky tech that may or may give the same result twice in a row. For that to happen, you need to make what’s going on in the cloud act like it’s located right now the hall and not thousands of miles away. What that takes is more appropriate connectivity.

The Internet is a two-edged sword. It’s attractiveness comes from being able to connect anywhere to anywhere, anytime, at dirt-cheap prices compared to private telecom lines and networks. The downside is that it is a public resource where everybody and everything is moving around in one big swarm. You can get clogs where it all moves at a snail’s pace. Some of the information just mysteriously disappears. How you are getting from point A to point B is a mystery and the routing changes by the minute for no discernible reason. That’s OK if you are just looking something up in Wikipedia or buying some parts from a wholesaler. The system was designed to work accurately as long as you can be a little flexible on how fast things run. It’s real time functions like telephone, video conferencing and interactive apps that can’t take the variability in performance without choking.

This is why a lot of the bigger companies have gone to direct cloud access using private point to point connections like Fast Carrier Ethernet or GigE fiber. These lines provide the closest you can get to what you had on your local network. Traditional Internet access is handled by a separate connection that is a lot less expensive for uses that are a lot less demanding.

SD-WAN To The Rescue
A new approach to handling the Internet has appeared in the last few years to improve the performance of broadband connections so they can work with the new cloud applications but not break the bank. It’s a clever mash-up of connectivity that takes advantage of the fact that no two connections over the Internet are likely to experience the same problems at exactly the same time. One broadband service may vary all over the place with speed, latency, jitter and packet loss. Combine several diverse connections and an electronic traffic cop and you’ll have one much, much better service. The cost of two or three cheap wireline, wireless, Cable or satellite services can be a LOT less expensive than a single dedicated line service, but give you nearly the same experience.

What’s happening in the Software Defined Wide Area Network, as it’s called, is that each path through the Internet is monitored constantly as to how it is performing. When the next packet enters the network, the system decides right there and then which path to use. The next packet in line may go the same way, or it might get routed on a different connection if that one is better at that particular instant. There’s a lot of decision making going on in this SD-WAN, but it is invisible to you. You’ve got one connection from your local network, just like you did before.

Are you dissatisfied with using the Internet to support your business, but can’t cope with the eye-popping cost of a dedicated fiber line? Perhaps an SD-WAN approach could give you the performance you really need at a fraction of the cost. Get pricing and learn more about how SD-WAN can make the cloud work so much better.

Now VoIP is Spelled C-L-O-U-D

By: John Shepler

When VoIP telephony first appeared on the scene, it looked distinctly like a different way to make a phone line. In fact, a lot of the motivation in switching technologies was based on trying to avoid long distance toll charges on the PSTN. We’ve come a long way from Analog Telephone Adaptors (ATA) to IP PBX. The next big migration is away from in-house VoIP systems and out to the cloud. It’s a migration that could easily turn into a stampede.

The Need For Speed
What’s driving the continuing innovation in VoIP technology? It’s all part of the business reorientation away from ownership. The “great recession” exacerbated a trend that was already underway. Business wants and needs to be nimble. Timelines that used to be measured in years are now months. This is especially true for seasonal businesses, but can affect everybody. Why do you want to be stuck with assets that are too much or too little for what you need right now? Why, indeed, when you have to option to match resources to needs on the fly?

Nimble is the Cloud
That’s the promise of the cloud. As one tenant among many at a datacenter with seemingly unlimited resources, you can quickly scale up and down as needed. It’s unlikely that your needs will tax the system or leave it sitting idle. If the providers are doing their jobs, there will be plenty of capacity for everyone and enough in reserve to handle unexpected requirements.

Contrast that with running your own data center in-house. Running out of capacity? You better get to work preparing the justification and requests for more capital. Then get the equipment and software ordered, installed and on-line… before external events bring your business to its knees. That’s weeks, months and sometimes years.

Much easier just to make a phone call or, better yet, log-in to your online control panel and activate or deactivate resources. An unexpected flood of orders is cause for celebration instead of panic when you can respond instantly. Business fall off a cliff? No need to be stuck paying for idle capital when you can be rid of it and its unjustified expense in a moment.

Why Do You Really Need a Phone System?
The obvious reason to have a business phone system is for critical communications among employees, customers and vendors. Actually, that’s the reason to have the phone function. You don’t really need to have the system yourself.

The telephony cloud solution is called Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX. All that “big iron”, as these systems are lovingly referred to, go out the door. They are replaced by cloud services that take care of call switching and connections to the public telephone system. How that’s done is invisible to you. Your phones work the way they should and you don’t have to deal with having to maintain a morass of wiring and rack equipment.

You also don’t have to cough up the capital needed to purchase a premises telephone switching system or replace one that has reached its capacity limit or useful life. Adding or removing phone from a hosted system is almost trivial. You’ll always have exactly the right level of resources to meet today’s needs. You also have the peace of mind that comes from knowing if things change tomorrow, you can easily accommodate the new situation.

The Technology Advantage
Another promise of VoIP technology is that phone networks become more like computer networks. In fact, there is generally one network that serves both phones and computing equipment. Building phones with little computers inside expands the possible functions they can do and make it easy to integrate them with desktop computers for combined operations. That’s especially valuable for call center operations.

The cloud hosted phone system also may have the capability to integrate mobile phones as well as the hardwired variety. Few in-house PBX systems can do that. In the end, you want employees to be able to do their jobs whether they are at their desks, out in the field, in a hotel room or anywhere else. That’s something technology can accomplish today… but you can’t do it with yesterday’s gear.

Are You Missing Out?
The telephone cloud has developed so rapidly that many companies aren’t even aware of the capability that’s out there and how cost effective it can be. Could you benefit from a hosted VoIP phone solution ? You might be able to sooner than you think.

What Does “Five Nines” Mean to You?

By: John Shepler

Five nines reliability. It's the standard often quoted for traditional telephone service and top network equipment vendors. But what does it really mean? Just how close to perfect is five nines anyway? Let’s take a look.


Reliability or Availability
The spoken term five-nines refers to the number 99.999%. This number is generally referred to as a reliability figure. Actually, what people call reliability is more correctly called "availability." It's not just how often a piece of equipment has a software crash or a power supply bursts into flames that is really important. It's how much of the time you actually get to use it. In other words, how much of the time is this particular device available. Availability includes how often it breaks and then how fast it gets put back into service. You also have to include how often it is out of service or unavailable due to routine maintenance.

An Example
Say your softswitch has a software glitch that only shows up under obscure combinations of events. When the glitch occurs once every six months, the software crashes and automatically reboots. That takes a minute. Does this switch have five nines uptime? Yes. Now if a power supply smokes once a year and it takes 20 minutes to fix it, that's not good enough for five nines even though the power supply failure occurs less frequently.

By the Numbers
Here are some handy numbers to give you perspective on the whole nines issue:

Five nines or 99.999% availability means 5 minutes, 15 seconds or less of downtime in a year.

Or, if you are really ambitious, shoot for six nines or 99.9999% availability, which allows 32 seconds or less downtime per year.

Otherwise, four nines or 99.99% availability allows 52 minutes, 36 seconds downtime per year.

Three nines or 99.9% availability allows 8 hours, 46 minutes downtime per year. This is often acceptable for many non-critical applications.

Two nines or 99% availability allows 3 days, 15 hours and 40 minutes downtime per year. That’s somewhat marginal for business.

One nine or 9% availability allows over 332 days of downtime per year. That's right. You're only up and running about a month out of the year on average.

Zero nines, of course, is totally useless. It's 100% downtime per year.

How do you get more nines?
Buy the best equipment that's the easiest to repair. Then add redundancy. Highly reliable systems often include multiple power supplies & processors, plus battery backup, diesel or natural gas generators for longer power outages than batteries can handle, multiple diverse communication lines and extras of whatever else is likely to fail. Buggy software that crashes all the time is going to hurt your reliability. If it goes down a lot and takes a long time to get back online your availability also be hurt.

Include Everything
One thing to be aware of is that the five nines criteria tends to apply to whatever the person quoting it says it applies to. PBX systems that meet five nines availability may only do so for the core system and might not include individual line cards and certainly not the phones themselves and their wiring. If it's REALLY important that you minimize downtime, you need to consider EVERYTHING that can fail and make sure it is backed up and/or very easy to fix.

On Cloud 9’s
Another option to consider seriously is to move all those hardware availability issues to the cloud. Cloud services aren’t perfect, either, but they often can provide higher service availability than you can afford locally. That’s because the cloud architecture is designed for considerable redundancy and fast failover when problems occur. If you do opt for the cloud, though, be sure you have highly reliable bandwidth connections to your provider. A 5 nines hosted PBX system isn’t all that available if you have a flakey internet connection from your facility to the cloud. A dedicated SIP Trunk or a set of redundant trunks is a much better solution.

Nines for Your Needs
How many nines do you need and what’s the cost for WAN or cloud availability? Get the best price vs performance options for your particular requirements now.

Why Such a Stampede to The Cloud?

You can hardly turn around these days without hearing something about “the cloud.” Is it true that there is a mass migration under way from local data centers to cloud service companies? For those who make the move, why are they doing it and what do they hope to achieve?

The Cloud You Don’t Know
Cloud storage is the big app that’s getting all the press, but unlimited server capacity is also a strong draw. One application that you may not be thinking of is Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP. This is a replacement for your in-house telephone system. Yes, you still have phones, but they plug into your data network rather than their own telephone wiring. There is no switching system in-house. That’s in the cloud.

Why Hosted PBX?
You get rid of all the headaches associated with buying and maintaining the in-house system, including all of those moves, adds and changes. Plus, you pay only for what you need. Add phones as you need them and pay by the month for each one in service. Don’t need them anymore due to downsizing or change of business direction? Get rid of ‘em. Some providers will even give you the phones so you don’t have to buy them yourself. It’s a pretty sweet deal.

How can the cloud help your business?
Get the latest on competitive cloud services available for your business operations.

MPLS and Cloud Banish The PBX Monster For Good

By: John Shepler

Are you aware that you no longer have to deal with high investment, maintenance costs, staffing and vendor squabbles for your business telecommunication needs? Two technologies have emerged to make those frustrations a thing of the past for all size businesses. They are cloud hosted telephony and MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) networks. Both technologies are valuable in their own right. In combination, they make an unbeatable solution to your voice and data requirements.

Telesphere is a best-in-class provider of cloud-based managed services and solutions for unified communications as a service (UCaaS), especially for companies with multiple locations nationwide. Let’s have a look at the problems businesses need to solve and how Telesphere goes about solving them:


As I’m sure you know, cloud hosted PBX systems have been around awhile and are touted by many vendors. But, are you aware of the extra value that a private MPLS IP network adds to the solution?

Lower end hosted VoIP depends on the public Internet to act as a trunk line between your business locations and the vendor’s facilities. This appears to be a cost advantage since most companies already have broadband Internet installed. Why not just piggyback the phone system on the already paid for high speed Internet connection?

This does work to a degree, especially for the smallest most cost sensitive businesses. The Internet can easily handle voice, data and video simultaneously. Performance is another matter. The lack of resource control and quality of service mechanisms mean that you get what you get and that always isn’t the highest quality your employees and customers have come to expect.

A private MPLS network is engineered to handle the traffic from many customers simultaneously while guaranteeing the bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss characteristics you would enjoy from private lines, at a considerable cost savings. Telesphere owns and operates the largest nationwide MPLS IP network of the pure play cloud communications providers. This means that you have one vendor for delivery of your voice, data and Internet services and a system that is set up for high quality, high performance 24/7.

Do you recognize yourself as one of those frustrated users of business communications who have to deal with vendors pointing fingers at each other when things go wrong and that nagging feeling that you are paying too much for too little? It’s time to take a closer look at cloud based unified communications services to better meet your needs.

Here’s Why Companies Actually Want BYOD

By: John Shepler

Do you wince when someone brings up the topic of BYOD or Bring Your Own Device? It can be more than an ulcer producer for IT managers. The whole company’s intellectual property can be put at risk by employees blissfully aware of the threats. They bring in what they want and connect it to the company network. Your carefully planned security protocols go out the window. What to do?

Most companies have drawn a clear line between what belongs to the company and what belongs to the individual. Unable to manage the wild and wooly world of consumer electronics configurations, they simply lay down the law and say you can’t use your personal phone, laptop or tablet for company business. But since you clearly need technology to do your job, something has to give. In frustration, the company issues you a corporate smartphone, laptop or tablet that are only used for business. Does that put the issue to rest?

Oh, not really. Smaller companies can’t afford to pony up the capital to hand out gadgets to everyone who needs or wants them. They may simply wince and take their chances that nothing will go horribly wrong. Larger operations install firewalls and other means to protect key information and hope they will be a bulwark against data going out and intruders coming in. Meanwhile, employees continue to casually use their own equipment, both inside and outside the company, for business activities.

Why? Partly because it’s more convenient. Also because everybody likes what they’ve customized for their own use. They don’t want to be carrying two copies of everything and switching back and forth. They don’t want to have to mentally jog between different hardware and different operating systems. It’s just not human nature.

Is there anyway to bridge this gulf and make everybody happy? One answer may be found in the new XO WorkTime service. It’s a cloud based UC (Unified Communications) application that integrates your company’s communications systems with employee smartphones and laptops. In effect, the personal devices become access devices to the same resources provided within the corporate walls.

So, here’s why you actually want BYOD… as long as you keep it under your control with an app like XO WorkTime. The first big advantage is capital investment. Why should you as a company manager spend thousands or millions of dollars to build and manage a pool of equipment when your employees will do that for you at their expense. You don’t have to buy them a smartphone because they’ve already bought their own iPhone or Android smartphone.

The next big advantage is happier employees. You’re no longer on their case about turning off their personal gadgets inside the company. Less nagging, less spying, less scolding and everybody’s in a better mood. It gets even better when employees realize that they have their desk phones on their personal phones. They can roam at will and be connected with other employees and customers effortlessly.

Here’s how this works. Your company needs to be using XO’s VoIP service internally. These include IP Flex, IP Flex with VPN, SIP, Enterprise SIP and Hosted PBX services. You simply install the XO WorkTime application on every device that needs it. At that point employee devices have a dual personality. They are work phones and they are personal phones.

The personal side remains unchanged. Personal apps and information are the same as they were. They also remain outside of the company side of the WorkTime app. What happens on the personal side stays on the personal side.

What happens on the business side also stays on the business side. You can safely transport business communications using encryption and VPN tunneling. Your company applications stay in a secure, password protected environment.

Employees have their business calling plan and office number while they are in WorkTime mode. They’ll use the same calling features they use in the office from the WorkTime applications while on the go. That includes features such as simultaneous ring on desk, smartphone or home computer plus presence, IM and video. On-net, local and inbound calls are free. Long distance calls are included in the company plan and don’t count against your personal minutes.

Are you frustrated with the cost and security problems related to enabling mobile business communications? Get expert consulting to learn more about how XO WorkTime and other sophisticated hosted VoIP services can work to your advantage.

You Pay Too Much For Your Business Phone

While we’ve been busily gathering and servicing new customers, the telephone industry has been changing behind our backs. If you are still using the same phone and provider that you had a decade ago, it’s seriously time for a review. You not only could be, but probably are, paying way more than you would have to and be missing out on some newer productivity features.

What’s so different now? After all, a phone is a phone, right?

Ah, not so anymore. All phones used to be pretty much the same. That’s because they all came from the same supplier, the local telephone company. The phone was a big dumb peripheral to the large scale switching system at the central office. Most single line phones were built from passive components and got their power through the phone line. Multi line business phones were also built from passive components but supplied from a power supply and line card rack in the back room. That was necessary to create such features as flashing a line button when it was on hold.

Some of business phones you can buy today are not much more sophisticated that the one’s that Ma Bell supplied. One difference is that they may have a plug-in power supply or batteries to power the electronics inside. The one to four line key telephone systems that you can buy from office supply stores have replaced the old electromagnetic switching with smaller electronic boxes. Still, they all work on the same old telephone lines called POTS.

POTS stands for Plain Old Telephone Service. It consists of independent analog business lines that run from your office to the phone company over twisted pairs of copper wires. Power and switching signals are provided by the telco switching system. The in-house key system lets you have more than one line on a phone with LEDs to show what’s in use or on hold.

Did you know that you can get POTS service from companies other than your local phone company? The telephone industry has been deregulated so that other providers can lease the bare copper wires that run to your office and supply you with local and long distance service. There can be a cost savings in doing nothing more than switching providers. Your phone system will work exactly the same as it does now only you’ll get a lower monthly phone bill.

If your system has grown to more than a half dozen lines, especially if you have upgraded to an in-house PBX switching system, you could benefit from bringing in a digital trunk line instead of all those separate analog lines. A digital trunk called T1 CAS or ISDN PRI bundles up to 23 or 24 separate lines into a single line that still keeps the phone conversations independent. Why do this? You could realize a big cost savings from consolidating your lines. Chances are that your PBX system already has a T1 or PRI connection or you can upgrade with a adaptor card.

You may be wondering if VoIP telephony is for you. The consumer grade services that run on the Internet may not give you the call quality consistency that you need for good customer support or other business communications. What can work very well and save you considerable money is something called a SIP Trunk. This is a digital line that transports both telephone calls and broadband Internet access but keeps them completely separate so they don’t interfere. It’s a way to take advantage of VoIP technology without losing call quality or reliability.

The latest innovation is cloud based communications, also called Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX. This is sort of like going back to just having phones in-house connected to the phone company’s switching center. The difference is that you aren’t stuck with the local phone company as your only choice. Using SIP Trunks, you can connect to many different providers, all competing for your business. Not only can you save money on your monthly bill, but you’ll avoid investing in expensive PBX or Key telephone systems and get advanced features like being able to include your smartphones in the system.

Does this whet your appetite to investigate what is available for your business telephone needs? Get prices and features for a variety of business phone service options so you can be fully informed before making any new commitments.

Hosted PBX Adds Video Services

Hosted PBX, also called Hosted VoIP, is becoming popular with large, medium and small businesses as a way to get the latest phone features without the big investment. Now that capability is being expanded to include video services as well.

MegaPath, a major competitive network carrier and cloud service provider, is adding cloud-delivered unified communications video services to its hosted PBX portfolio.

The key to video with voice is a new generation of business phones that replaces traditional analog desk phones and even VoIP digital phones. Polycom, one of the leaders in IP telephony, calls these media phones. These are telephones with video screens. Think of them as tablets that look like telephones. Some have cameras built-in. Others use a plug-in webcam.

Unified Communications (UC) is the process of combining voice, data and video on a single network. UC in the cloud is the next step. All you need are your company LAN and the network attached equipment that meets your business needs. In many cases, this is desktop computers and telephones. Everything else can go to the cloud. Add video capability and you have desktop conferencing without buying any new servers or making big changes to your network. All the complexity involved in making this work is handled out there in the cloud.

What are the advantages of adding video to your voice communications? You instantly have video conferencing without the infrastructure and inconvenience of setting up special video conference rooms and having people convene there at a particular time. Video conferencing has long been used as a substitute for expensive and time consuming travel. Desktop video conferencing takes that to the next level. Now you can have spontaneous or scheduled video conferences without having to uproot otherwise productive employees just to waste time gathering at the other end of the office.

Where else do you see this type of personalized video communications? Smartphones, of course. Also tablets, Ultrabooks and laptop computers. All of these have one thing in common: mobility.

The fact is that people don’t work in one particular location anymore. You may have your first conversations before you leave home in the morning or on the way to work. Then you spend some time at your desk along with moving around in the office. Many employees will leave the office building at some point to meet with clients or other business and personal related activities. In the old days that means having an operator take your incoming messages or letting callers record voicemail. You’d find out who was calling and why when you got back to your desk.

At the speed of business now, you can’t afford to be incommunicado for hours or even minutes. A missing employee can put an entire team project on hold. A sales prospect may well move on to the next vendor if they don’t get through to a person immediately. You need all of your communications integrated into one unified system.

This is where cloud-based PBX services shine. They support integrating desk phones and mobile phones in a process called Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC). With the addition of video and single number calling, you are now connected at all times with the same feature set no matter where you happen to be.

Another feature of many hosted VoIP systems is HD audio. We’re used to the sound of standard “toll grade” voice quality. This has somewhat degraded with the introduction of mobile phones and some inadequate VoIP systems. HD audio reverses the trend to make VoIP a higher voice quality service than traditional analog and digital TDM arrangements.

Are you feeling that your current business phone system is hurting rather than enhancing your productivity. Are you having maintenance headaches or face a major capital investment in new equipment? Don’t commit yourself to any particular solution until you’ve had the chance to evaluate Hosted PBX Cloud Services for audio and video communications.

Will 2013 Be Your Year of the Cloud?

Cloud computing has been the hot topic of 2012. There are more vendors with more solutions than ever before. You no longer need the power of a super computer to justify using cloud services. The evolution of the cloud has progressed to the point where even commonly used resources may make more sense hosted remotely than in-house. So, is 2013 the year that you make the move to the cloud?

For many companies, that answer will be a resounding “Yes.” It’s a matter of economics, support and access. Doing everything yourself has the lure of being totally in control of your destiny. In return, you have to come up with the capital investment in new equipment, the staff to run everything and the ongoing cost of maintenance. Often, that means giving up the ability to respond quickly to a changing business environment. It’s just too expensive to have personnel and equipment on standby, “just in case.”

Another strong selling point of many cloud providers is that they can afford to keep with the very latest technology trends. You may have to wait until your equipment is fully depreciated or until you can come up with the funding in order to get all the latest features available on the newest models of equipment. Hotly competing cloud companies have no choice but to stay at the cutting edge of technology or risk being put out of business by other more nimble providers.

Disaster recovery can be much easier with a cloud-based system. The cloud operator builds in the necessary redundancies, including geographical diversity so that no single event can knock out the whole system. All you need is access. That’s a lot easier to come by than having to reorder an entire data center’s worth of equipment and software and getting it up and running. Even with remote or cloud backup, it can take days or weeks to fully download and restore your business database. With everything in the cloud, the data is online at all times and unaffected by situations that cut off your connectivity or destroy your local offices.

Some companies have unusually high bandwidth requirements. Content providers who stream video over the Internet or provide programming to Internet Service Providers require massive amounts of bandwidth. It’s not uncommon to need 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps or even 40 Gbps to support live streaming of multiple HD video programs. That kind of bandwidth is readily available in cloud data centers, but might not be available locally. You may be faced with moving your operation in order to get the fiber optic connections you need to conduct business. If your servers are in the cloud with high speed connections it takes the pressure off the line speed requirements from your office to the cloud.

What’s available now in the cloud? It’s pretty much everything you need to run a small, medium or large scale business. Virtual servers with virtual storage give you all the computing power and disk space that you’ll ever need. You can ramp these resources up and down using a desktop control panel in real time. This is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Along with the infrastructure, you are going to need software. Software as a Service (SaaS) complements IaaS so that you pay by the month by usage for all your software and hardware. A related component, Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the cloud version of a development system where you get things customized and working. You only buy this as you need to do development. Security as a Service is a add-on feature that protects your network from intrusion. Once again, it is running from within the cloud.

Even the telephone system has a cloud equivalent. This is called Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP. The switching system and connection to the public telephone network is all done by the cloud service provider. You install SIP telephones that connect to your network and use a special line called a SIP trunk to connect with the provider. You no longer need to buy and maintain an in-house PBX. Some vendors will even include free SIP phones with your service.

Have you been watching cloud developments but hesitant to get involved? This is a great time to get competitive prices and features on cloud computing and communications appropriate for your size business. If you like the answers, you can easily sign up for service and enjoy the new features and cost savings for all of 2013.

Cloud Based Unified Communications

Servers in the cloud are now commonly accepted. Many IT organizations are finding it makes more sense to have nearly instant access to nearly unlimited processing and storage than be constantly trying to figure out how much hardware to order for next year. You have a problem either way. Guess too low and you run out of capacity when unexpected business comes your way. Guess too high and you are saddled with expensive resources that sit there idle, using power but not doing much else. It’s a good thing that you don’t have these problems with the phone system. Or do you?

In a way, your PBX switching system can be thought of as just another server. Chances are that it is a proprietary design that only the vendor supports. It’s also deals with IO (Input/Output) that is unique to the telephone industry. Just how scalable is this system? Probably not much. You start out ordering as much capacity as you can anticipate and most of it sits idle awaiting the business to grow into in. At some point you run out of capacity and no more phones or lines can be connected. For awhile, you can work around these limitations by ordering additional interface boards. Then the whole design goes obsolete and you start all over.

How would you like to get rid of this headache and greatly expand your voice communications options? As you might suspect, the answer is in the cloud. With cloud based communications, all switching and message storage is done on cloud based servers. You simply need a user access device known as a SIP telephone or IP Phone. These devices piggyback on your data network can connect to the cloud using a specialized WAN connection called a SIP Trunk. Out goes all that phone wiring as well as the old clunker PBX and the expense of maintaining it and periodically buying a newer model. The cloud keeps all the hardware and software up to date.

Need more capacity? Just bring it online the way you order up more cloud servers. In this case, the capacity is measured in terms of “seats.” One seat is one telephone. You need more phones? Order additional seats as required. You pay for these per seat per month. Many times the price you pay is a fixed amount that includes your domestic local and long distance calling plus a plethora of features.

Speaking of features, cloud based PBX or hosted PBX systems can do tricks that your old in-house PBX hardware can’t. For instance, much of today’s business communication is done on smartphones. PBX equipment doesn’t know what to do with a smartphone. There’s no wire to plug it into a port on the machine. So, what you wind up with is a stand-alone office phone and a separate smartphone with its own features on its own network. If you spend a lot of time in the field, you’ll need to call into your desk phone voice mail from time to time just to see if there are any important messages. Well, at least when you’re in the office you can have both your desk phone and smart phone at hand.

Wouldn’t you rather have one number for clients to call and let the system sort out where to send it? That’s the idea behind unified communications. Instead of having all sorts of different ways that you communicate, each with their own device and connectivity, you integrate everything into one system that can handle it all. This can include traditional landline telephones plus wireless smartphones, but it can also include video conferencing, text messaging, email and FAX. What all of these have in common is that they are all network communications that are integrated on your own network. The SIP trunk connects your network to your provider’s network and vast cloud resources.

One provider, the global communications company Masergy, has expanded the role of cloud based unified communications to include CRM system integration, call accounting, call recording, automated attendants, hunt groups and call center features. Your access is by telephone, video phone, desktop computer, mobile device, laptop computer and business systems. They’re all connected to the cloud, making it possible to connect across diverse platforms. It doesn’t matter where you are or what you are doing. You always have access to the same calling features and applications.

Have you just about reached the end of the “line” with your old in-house PBX phone system? Before you invest a fortune in a newer model and perpetuate the same old frustrations, consider a move to cloud based unified communications. You’ll probably find that you can get more productivity at less cost by switching to the latest cloud communications services.

Earth to Cloud Network Security Solutions

IT professionals understand that their corporate networks need to be secured. They also realize that cloud computing services at remote data centers need enterprise level security. But what about everything in-between? Once your LAN is extended to a remote location, your vulnerability may go up.

Level 3 Communications has addressed this situation with a comprehensive global security solutions suite they describe as “Earth to Cloud.” The idea is to provide multi-layered protection that keeps everything in the loop... and out of the reach of those who would do you harm.

The key to the success of this approach is a single provider for connectivity and network security. Level 3 is well positioned to be that provider. Their core network spans the globe with a variety of access options. Many content providers take advantage of the Level 3 content delivery network (CDN) to bypass the performance and security challenged Internet and put their content on a fast lane to their customers.

So, what is included in this comprehensive security package? Major elements include Secure Access Services, Managed Security Services, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) mitigation, Security Consulting Services, vulnerability scanning combined with DDoS blocking and familiar network edge elements such as anti-virus, anti-spam, and intrusion detection.

Sounds good, but how much support can you count on if you suddenly come under attack. In the case of Level 3, you’ll have 24/7/365 access to their security experts located in four redundant security operations centers (SOCs).

Managed security services are becoming more and more popular among businesses large and small. Part of this is a change in IT philosophy from doing everything in-house to outsourcing many services to companies that specialize in those activities. Cloud computing really started this mass migration when virtualization offered the opportunity to pay only for the resources you are actually using while reserving the opportunity to rapidly scale those resources up and down to match the flow of business in near real time.

Cloud services have expanded way beyond mere renting of processor cycles. They now include complete software solutions or Software as a Service (SaaS), development platforms or Platform as a Service (PaaS) and the computing and storage hardware known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Telephony has moved to the cloud as well. VoIP technology allows the network to substitute for dedicated telephone lines. It also means the PBX switching system can be located anywhere, including the cloud. Hosted PBX, as it is called, is another money saver for businesses large and small.

Cloud computing, hosted VoIP and network services such as WAN management and security have created a comprehensive set of solutions for companies that want to be more agile in the face of uncertain economic times. Could this approach be of benefit to your company? Check out cloud and network solutions tailored to your specific needs.

How to Get Your Business Phones For Free

You’d like to update your phone system, but the cost is hard to justify. After all, you can still receive and make calls just fine. What you are missing out on are all the cool features that the more advanced phones have to offer. You may also be stuck with a phone system that doesn’t work with your wireless phones and other mobile device. What do you do? Sit and watch as your competitors gain productivity advantages?

Would you be surprised to learn that you can easily afford all those up to date phone features and put new high tech phones on every desk? Would you be more surprised to find out that you won’t have to invest a penny of your own money to make this upgrade?

It’s hard to believe, but true. The secret is a change in business model from owning everything to paying for what you actually use by the month. This is the power of cloud based communications.

The big technical advance that makes telephony in the cloud a winner is getting the telephones on the data network and off their own proprietary network. There are a couple of key reasons this better both technically and financially.

The technical reason is that LAN and WAN networks have far more bandwidth available than common telco channels. These include traditional analog business lines and multiplexed calls over ISDN PRI digital trunks. Both are good for something like 64 Kbps or less. No problem for voice conversations that are limited to less than 4 KHz. Also no problem for low speed data like Caller ID or dial-up modem service. Now compare this to network connections that start at 1.5 Mbps (T1) and go up to 1,000 Mbps (GigE) and beyond. This opens the door to transport dozens or hundreds of simultaneous calls on one trunk and enabling other features like HD voice for higher call quality.

In fact, there is so much bandwidth available that you can use the same WAN network connection to transport both telephone and Internet data over a single trunk line.

But, wait, aren’t there call quality issues when you send phone calls over the Internet? The trick is not to let the phone calls themselves touch the Internet. Broadband Internet and telephone calls are combined at the provider and then separated at the user location. The combination process uses the same line, but keeps voice and data from interfering. This is done by giving voice packets priority status, something you can’t do on the Internet.

You get higher bandwidth for more call capacity and both broadband and telephone service on a single network line. This is part of the cost savings. More comes from being able to select your provider from many competing cloud communications providers. What a lot of people don’t realize is that analog copper telephone lines are owned by the local phone company. Network connections can go anywhere and aren’t owned by the local telcos.

The last piece of the puzzle is moving the call switching system from the telephone company or a back room in your building to the cloud. Cloud hosted PBX systems have the economy of scale and spread the cost over many customers. Since the hosted PBX provider specializes in this service, these systems are kept up to date with the latest feature sets.

So how do you get free phones? Some, but not all, cloud communications providers include new IP desk telephones as part of your monthly service fee. This allows them to optimize their systems for particular phone models, buy in quantity, and ship you brand new telephones to replace the old ones you have now. If staff up and need more phones, they care shipped to you ready to plug into your network.

Would you like to upgrade your current business phone system without having to make a capital investment? Are providers offering free phones more cost effective than those that don’t? The way to find out is to get competitive quotes for a variety of hosted PBX service providers and see what best meets your needs.

MegaPath Puts Your Complete Office In The Cloud

You’ve been interested in cloud services, but it seems like ordering all those different services and then getting them to work together is more grief than just keeping everything separate. Now there’s a new solution that bundles all the IT services you need to run a small business at bargain pricing.

The thing about smaller businesses is that they don’t have or want to pay for enterprise level technology. The big VoIP phone systems and on-site data centers are ridiculous expenses for companies that only have a few or a few dozen telephones and computers. You may think that the big cost savings are only available through economy of scale. That used to be true, but hosted solutions have changed all that. You can get better pricing, more features and better performance even in a small retail store or professional office.

The magic behind this is called hosting. You might think of hosting as something that powers your website. Up till recently, that’s all that hosting was about. The big change underway is to use the same principles that work for website hosting and apply them to telephone, email, security, data backup and more.

MegaPath Complete Office Solutions bundles scalable voice, data and hosted IT solutions in a package that is designed to increase productivity and save you money. They can do that because MegaPath is a major competitive carrier and provider of IT services. They have massive data centers of their own and can provide you both the hosted services and the business bandwidth to make them work.

That’s important because you need to get to your services in the cloud. If all you have is an unreliable Internet connection or too-small bandwidth line service, even the best hosted services will fail. Get your bandwidth and cloud from the same reliable provider and you’ll have an ally to ensure it all works together optimally.

Here’s what Complete Office Solutions includes. First, you get a hosted voice solution as your business telephone service. Hosted voice means that you no longer have a key telephone PBX system to maintain. All of the switching, including in-house, local and long distance calls are handled by the hosted switching equipment in the cloud. You still have telephones, but they are IP telephones that connect to your company network, not to the telephone company. Your network connection is extended to MegaPath using their bandwidth solutions that are carefully managed to ensure that voice quality is maintained.

By the way, the new telephone sets you’ll need are included in your service price. There is no capital investment required. You pay a very reasonable price per seat per month for everything. You’ll have free use of either of two sophisticated office phones, the Cisco SPA 303G or the Polycom SoundPoint IP 335. These phone give you advanced calling features such as unlimited national calling, call forwarding, call waiting, caller ID, call transfer find me / follow me, HD voice, voicemail and options that include hunt groups, auto attendant and analog faxing.

By the way, this hosted system is easily scalable. That means that you can add seats and even other business locations without the expense and upset of ripping out equipment and installing something with more capacity. All the capacity you’ll ever need is right there in the cloud. All you add is more seats as you need them, any only pay for what you are using.

Beyond business telephone, you’ll have broadband access, 5GB of initial data backup and hosted Exchange email. Hosted SharePoint for collaboration is also available as an optional service. The bundle includes free equipment and free installation. It’s everything you need for a modern business.

Are you ready for a more modern and more integrated office technology solution without the pain of capital investment or the need to get everything working yourself? You may be ready for a cloud hosted business communications solution available on a pay as you go basis. It’s the new way to get the IT and telephony services you need to run your business.

Out Of The Recession, Into The Cloud

In the midst of the Great Recession, a huge business transformation has been underway. The way companies do business in the next decade will be far different from the processes they employed in the decades up till now. The new normal will be far more agile and driven by everything in the cloud.

Why the cloud? Think of the cloud as the new data center, the new machine shop, the new steam engine, the new printing press. It will be the heart of heart of many businesses and an essential process tool for others.

There are two prime needs that are driving this shift to cloud solutions. One is the desire to reduce costs, both capital expenses and operation expenses, and tie the level of expenditures more closely with the level of business. The other need is closely related. It is the need for agility to survive and prosper within any business climate.

Both of these needs have risen to prominence in this protracted downturn. Business cycles are normal. Companies are accustomed to going with the flow. You expand when things are booming and contract or at least hold your own when things slow. In a few months or a year business picks up again.

Well, that’s how it was for decades. What’s different this time is both the depth and the duration of the pull back. Companies that found themselves locked into expenses based on normal business levels are in a pickle. Some have been unable to weather the storm and have had to fold their tents. Others, in better shape, have taken notice and are making moves to prevent getting caught in an untenable situation themselves.

This is where the cloud is starting to look attractive. Cloud services that were once only available to large companies with massive processing needs have been scaled down to suit smaller and medium size businesses. The more important computers and/or the Internet are to running your business, the more useful the cloud can be. If you use PCs, tablets, smartphones, or business telephones, there are cloud solutions that are right for you.

What moves to the cloud? Servers, of course. You replace racks full of servers in the back room or a environmentally controlled data center with virtual servers that you run remotely. Those servers run your business applications, often in the form of Software as a Service (SaaS). Accounting, marketing, customer service, sales, inventory control, team collaboration, project management, billing and invoicing, ecommerce, human resources, and transaction processing are examples of what can be done in the cloud. Specialized servers power your business phones from the cloud.

Your cloud servers, storage and public facing bandwidth replace similar IT resources within your company. There difference is that you are now renting these resources rather than owning and operating them. You no longer have to make the equipment investment or perform the maintenance, upgrades and repairs. You don’t have to be concerned about data backups because these can be setup to run automatically within the cloud.

The other thing that you have with cloud solutions is the agility to scale your operations up or down at will. The physical cloud has more resources than you can ever use yourself. You can add and subtract servers and drives, often immediately with online control. You pay only for what you use while you are using it. When business slows, you back off to meet your new needs. When things pick up, you add resources as you need to and can afford to pay for from an increasing revenue stream.

Do you feel that your company would be better able to deal with uncertain business conditions if you could easily adjust technical resources and expenses? If so, you should consider taking advantage of cloud computing and communications services on a scale that makes sense for your business.

Best VoIP Providers For Business

VoIP has been transforming the telecom industry for years now. As a business owner or manager you may be wondering if you are missing out on something important by sticking with your tried and true analog telephone service. Does VoIP really work? Can it really save a business money?

Yes, indeed, VoIP technology is for real. It is sometimes called “network voice,” a term that describes what the technology is all about. The idea is that your company computer network can carry telephone conversations as an application if they are compatible with other network equipment. This is possible when telephones are turned into network peripherals called IP telephones or SIP telephones.

This sounds like a clever tech trick, but just where does the cost savings come in? For VoIP to make any difference, you need to be able to get rid of your old telephone wiring, PBX system and analog lines. Then the phones and the computers share the remaining company LAN and broadband connection to the outside world.

Here’s where it gets tricky. All VoIP isn’t the same. Voice and data packets might look similar, but they have very different needs. Voice is a real time streaming service. Anything that interferes with the smooth and continuous transfer of packets from one phone to another without delay is going to make the conversation sound crummy. Network congestion, latency and packet loss that doesn’t faze data transfers will destroy phone calls. There is no plug-and-play for VoIP. The network, including any outside telecom lines, have to be specially set up to support voice services or they won’t work very well.

The best VoIP providers take measures to insure that your phone service works as well as it does now or even better. In general, this means that you need a private line connecting you to your service provider. That line must be specially conditioned so that voice packets have priority over data packets. You won’t notice fractions of a second delays in data downloads, but you sure will if they affect the phone calls. Voice needs a guarantee of bandwidth, latency, jitter and congestion so it can work perfectly.

For most companies, the ideal approach is to let your VoIP service provider also be your bandwidth provider... at least for any lines transporting VoIP phone calls. This way you can be sure that those lines will be optimized for best VoIP performance. This is especially important for smaller companies that will save money by using a single integrated T1 line or SIP trunk to provide both dedicated Internet access and VoIP telephone service.

Larger companies may have dedicated SIP trunks that transport only phone conversations. Like ISDN PRI, each SIP trunk can transport a certain number of calls within its bandwidth capacity. How many simultaneous calls depend on the CODEC (Coder/Decoder) that does the conversion between analog and digital. The universal standard is G.711 which is the same standard used in T1 telephone and ISDN PRI. Other codecs offer HD voice that is more understandable than standard telephone audio or they use less bandwidth to cram more conversations per trunk. Be careful here, though, the lowest bandwidth CODECS gain their efficiency at the expense of voice quality.

Perhaps the most popular business VoIP service right now is called hosted VoIP, hosted PBX or telephony in the cloud. You have only SIP telephones in-house. All switching and connections to outside lines is done at the service provider. Cost savings of 60% or more are being promoted for this type of service.

There are other arrangements you may also be interested in. Some VoIP companies offer an “analog handoff” so you can use regular telephone sets with VoIP service. You don’t get as many features with this hybrid arrangement, but you may save the cost of upgrading all your phones and wiring. Note: Some VoIP providers may include new SIP phones with your service agreement to sweeten the deal. That can make the upgrade well worth your while.

Still other VoIP providers work with your in-house PBX telephone system and only replace the trunk lines that would otherwise go to the local telephone company or competitive carrier. If you are happy with your current phone system but just want the opportunity to save on your monthly phone bill, this can be a good solution. When it comes time to replace or upgrade your PBX, you can review the situation and see if going with a hosted PBX makes more sense than paying for a new system.

Even if you only have a single telephone or a few desk phones in your company, you may be able to save substantially with service from one of the best VoIP providers for business. Get competitive quotes and features now.

How Does Cloud Computing Work In Business?

We hear a lot about “the cloud” these days. Just what is the cloud and how does it help you do business better, faster and cheaper? Let’s have a look.

Usually when we say that business is cloudy, it’s not a good thing. Cloudy implies fuzzy and unpredictable. Wouldn’t you rather have clear and predictable instead? Financially speaking, of course you would. This is why people cock an eyebrow when somebody says you need to go off to the cloud somewhere.

You know, this is really a problem of semantics more than anything. When we talk about cloud computing, cloud storage or cloud networking, we’re not talking about dealing with fuzzy logic, quantum mechanics or anything else that you can’t quite nail down. The “cloud” with respect to IT and telecommunications services is quite determinate. The metaphor of the cloud is more about not having to be personally concerned about the details of how something is being accomplished rather than once you turn your back it’s a free for all.

Let’s take cloud storage for instance. This is becoming the most popular cloud service because it works for both business and non-business users. Everybody has data. Today most of that data is spinning on hard drives in personal computers. Some of it is stored in solid state memory chips inside tablets and smartphones. There are two services that the cloud can provide your data. First, it can safely store a copy in case disaster strikes and your hard drive crashes or you leave your laptop or smartphone in a taxi. If nothing else, there are thousands of personal photographs or client records amassed over the course of years that won’t disappear forever in an instant.

Second, the cloud can provide a central repository that you can access from whatever device you have at the moment and from wherever you happen to be. Sure, there are remote access programs that let you reach into your PC from across town. That assumes that you leave your computer on all the time and that a specialized client is available that will work on all devices for all types of data. It’s not quite the same as going to the online cloud “warehouse” to fetch a copy of whatever. In fact, it is getting to the point where you don’t have to fetch at all. All of your devices can sync with the cloud so that they either have a copy of the file locally or it appears to the user that they do.

Cloud storage as automatic backup makes sense because we all pretty much suck at remembering to backup files ourselves. You can improve this a bit by adding an external disk drive with a program like Apple’s Time Machine to automatically make copies whether you are paying attention or not. Still, if your house or office burns down you lose everything in the ash heap of melted hard drives.

The cloud gets away from the problem of having everything in one place where it can be destroyed all at once by keeping a copy hundreds or thousands of miles away. But the cloud also backs up its own data. Remember that the cloud is not some vaporous collection of neurons in the sky. It is realized as a secure data center with racks and racks full of hardware. That’s hardware that can fail just as surely as your desktop PC or local server. Cloud providers need RAID and other protections for disk data along with battery and generator backup power to ensure that those files will be there when you call for them.

The business model behind the cloud is that very large data centers operated by dedicated service providers who specialize in cloud services can give hundreds, thousands or millions of clients all the disk storage, servers and bandwidth that they could possibly use at a lower cost than having each and every client replicate that data center on a smaller basis.

The secret to a successful cloud is virtualization. This is a technique where a fixed pool of hardware resources is sliced and diced so that it can be apportioned to customers as needed. The virtualization software makes it appear to each customer that they are in control of 1 or 100 or 1,000 separate servers and Terabytes worth of disk drives. In actuality, there are fewer actual hardware servers than there are virtual servers because few applications need to hog a whole server to themselves. Sometimes, however, a virtual server will encompass more than one physical server because it really, really needs that much power. It doesn’t matter to the application, the client or the cloud whether a particular server is physical or virtual. The job gets done and the client gets billed by the capacity used.

One specialized cloud service is hosted VoIP, also called hosted PBX or hosted voice. This is a telephone switching system that handles your internal and external phone calls exactly as the most modern in-house PBX system would. The difference is that all you have in the building are phone sets and a SIP Trunk connecting your network to the service provider. Like cloud computing and storage, you pay for what you use and never have to make a capital investment. When you need more, you simply order more and you have it in a flash.

Does the idea of the cloud make more sense as a resource and potential cost saver over what you are doing now? If so, get more information on cloud computing and communications services and compare prices with doing everything yourself. That should definitely make things a lot clearer.

Should You Buy VoIP as a Service?

Software as a Service (SaaS) has been around longer than people have been talking about “the cloud.” Frankly, so has VoIP. What’s gaining steam now is a move by larger businesses to tie their multiple locations together via SIP Trunks and outsourcing the PBX function by businesses of all sizes. You might consider this approach VoIP as a Service.

Many residential and small business users embraced VoIP in the cloud as a way to save money by dropping their analog line in favor of letting their broadband Internet connection do double duty as both a high speed Internet connection and a phone line. A device called an ATA or Analog Telephone Adaptor turns regular telephones into IP telephones so they can work on a computer network. This approach works, but the voice quality is highly variable. That’s because the Internet is mandated to treat all traffic equally. Unfortunately, this means that large data file or video downloads can congest the network and cause telephone calls to distort or drop.

There are a couple of ways to have both telephone and Internet service brought in on the same line. Cable companies do this by giving each service its own channel, along with the TV channels on the cable. TV channels don’t interfere with each other, so there is no reason that voice and data can’t also coexist as long as you keep them separated. To make this work, you need to get your business phone service from the cable company so they can manage the traffic.

Another method for delivering telephone and broadband service on the same line is the SIP Trunk. This is most often a T1 telecom line or Ethernet over Copper service running over twisted pair telco wiring. What makes it a SIP Trunk is Class of Service (CoS) enabled routers at both ends of the line. Voice packets automatically get priority with all other traffic using the remaining bandwidth. SIP Trunks are available where cable doesn’t go. You also get dedicated rather than shared Internet access for bandwidth that doesn’t vary depending on other users.

Larger SIP Trunks can be set up to interconnect multiple business locations for both voice and data traffic. If you have several branch offices, you probably already have private lines connecting them. Why not include your in-house telephone traffic and avoid paying telephone toll charges for calls to remote offices? The SIP Trunk will do that. It can be set up for multiple CoS levels so that voice and video get highest priority, mission critical data is next in line, Internet access is lower still and background activities like remote backup get whatever is leftover.

Some medium and large companies can benefit from SIP session consolidation. The way this works is that all the branch offices are connected via headquarters to the service provider using a large SIP trunk. The company pays for each channel or session that supports one call. Since the sessions are shared among all users in the company, there is no need to have dedicated separate trunks at each location with excess capacity going to waste.

The question that remains is whether you should continue to operate your own in-house PBX switching system or opt for a hosted PBX. The hosted option moves the PBX into the cloud, where it handles all of your internal and outside traffic. This is the ultimate in VoIP as a Service. You typically pay so much per seat per month. You can add more seats when you need them, as the cloud PBX has all the capacity you’ll ever use. No need to add extra capacity now. You simply pay for what you actually use. Some hosted VoIP providers will even include new IP phones in your monthly service fee so you don’t have to make any capital investment at all.

Does VoIP as a Service make sense for your company? Find out by getting competitive pricing and features for SIP Trunking and Hosted PBX telephone services for business.

Concentric Cloud Solutions Virtualizes Your Business

You’ve been hearing a lot about virtualization recently and are wondering if it could be the answer to your unpredictable business costs. The only problem is that you don’t know quite where to start. It seems like there’s a lot to know before you can start deploying virtualized anything. Relax. Concentric will take care of that for you.

Virtualization started out in the local data center but it’s now moved to the cloud. The whole idea behind virtualization is that you can get higher performance out of a hardware infrastructure by making one server look like many servers and a cluster of small servers look like a super computer.

Why not just pair off software applications and computers? That’s the way we’ve done it for generations, ever since the days of ENIAC. It certainly works but it’s inefficient. As loads vary, you may be using only a portion of a server or have is so overloaded that you really need two. It takes so long to order new equipment, get it mounted and spun up, that you can’t respond quickly to changing needs. In order to get reliability, you wind up over-provisioning hardware. Then a big unexpected surge of activity comes in and you crash.

Virtualization separates server functionality from server hardware. You may have a dozen servers running on a single physical machine. You may have one server running over a dozen machines. All the magic is done in software, so changes can be made almost instantly.

This is the secret of the cloud. Racks and racks full of physical servers can be sliced and diced into virtual servers provisioned with a few keystrokes. Disk farms become virtualized storage. If one company is the sole user of all this, it’s called a private cloud. If many customers can share the same resources without interference, it’s called a public cloud. The owner and operator of the public cloud has just one job. That is to keep the cloud running no matter what happens. Each tenant needs to feel like they are the only one in the cloud no matter how many clients there really are.

If you do it right, you can move your back office infrastructure to the cloud. That’s what Concentric Cloud Solutions is offering businesses as an alternative to in-house IT and Telecom facilities. Services include Enterprise Cloud that offers on-demand cloud computing on a pay as you go or monthly prepaid plan. Cloud Storage complements cloud computing by making storage sharing and management of files and data available in the cloud. Managed Services offer a private cloud environment for companies that still want dedicated servers but don’t want to make the investment in-house. Smaller companies can benefit from Cloud Hosting to support websites, email and domains.

Content providers have special needs when it comes to getting their products to their customers. Concentric Acceleration Services address these needs for digital media, online content, mobile and web-based applications. Content Caching accelerates deliver of static web content that is repeatedly downloaded. Application Acceleration does the same for dynamic content you find on information portals, e-commerce apps and social media. Video content, such as webcasts and movies, is improved by Video Streaming Content Acceleration.

Cloud Voice Services address “your other network.” Telephony has occupied its own proprietary space until recently. Now the trend is converged voice and data networks to get to one network for everything. The next step is moving the voice support infrastructure to the cloud just like you do data servers. Concentric offers a Cloud Contact Center so you can establish virtual contact centers that free agents to work from anywhere. Pricing is pay as you go. Interactive Voice Response, Intelligent Call Routing, Conferencing and Concentric Connect create a suite of services that make communications in the cloud the sensible way to go.

Are you facing another round of capital investment to upgrade an aging or inadequate infrastructure? Don’t sign any loan applications until you first take a look a virtualized cloud-based solutions for voice and data. You’ll have greater flexibility and minimal investment with pay as you go solutions.