Last Updated (Tuesday, 30 November 1999 00:00)
Written by Micki Kaufman
Tuesday, 31 August 2010 02:10
Redundancy is a time honored way to protect what is valuable, especially what you need to run a business. That’s why we do periodic backups. You just never know when those flying heads are going to crash into the disk platter and destroy thousands, even millions of dollars worth of valuable data. But how about the entire operation of your business? Do you have that protected?
Just having a backup disk in the company safe won’t be much help if your servers smoke or a tornado comes along and leaves nothing but a concrete pad where your building once stood. With so much of most businesses depending on computer automation, it makes sense to replicate everything. All you need is a completely duplicate IT infrastructure.
Sounds good, but where do you come up with the capital to replicate your server rooms, applications, complete data set in real time, and the glue that ties all this together? Relax, you don’t really have to. Qwest will take now take care of that for you.
What’s new is Qwest Real-Time Application Recovery. It’s a partnership with Geminare, a company that has pioneered RaaS or Recovery as a Service. Qwest has the WAN network structure and robust data centers to host a copy of your business. Geminare has the technology to make the process seamless to the user.
One thing you don’t need is a big capital budget. In fact, you don’t need any additional hardware on-site at all. This is a cloud based service that’s fully managed by Qwest. They replicate your servers, applications and data on a real-time basis. When disaster strikes, availability to access your data and applications continues uninterrupted. Your office building can be blown away, flooded or burned down. The business goes on as if nothing ever happened. Thus is the magic of the cloud.
How do you pay for this? There’s a monthly fee for the service. For that you get automatic failover, continued access to applications and data, immediate remote operational capability, complete data protection, platform and application support, real-time disaster recovery tests and 24/7 support. There’s near-zero down time, no capital expense, no technological lock-in and no administrative costs. Qwest takes care of all those details. It’s like they are a duplicate IT center that you rent by the month.
Is cloud recovery something that could mean the difference between staying in business or going under in the event of a major disaster? Is it worth what it costs when you consider the implication of lost business or the capital and operating expense of doing this yourself? Why not find out quickly and easily. Get competitive quotes on cloud recovery, networking and other services now. Don’t wait until you are in real trouble. It would be too late then.
Just having a backup disk in the company safe won’t be much help if your servers smoke or a tornado comes along and leaves nothing but a concrete pad where your building once stood. With so much of most businesses depending on computer automation, it makes sense to replicate everything. All you need is a completely duplicate IT infrastructure.Sounds good, but where do you come up with the capital to replicate your server rooms, applications, complete data set in real time, and the glue that ties all this together? Relax, you don’t really have to. Qwest will take now take care of that for you.
What’s new is Qwest Real-Time Application Recovery. It’s a partnership with Geminare, a company that has pioneered RaaS or Recovery as a Service. Qwest has the WAN network structure and robust data centers to host a copy of your business. Geminare has the technology to make the process seamless to the user.
One thing you don’t need is a big capital budget. In fact, you don’t need any additional hardware on-site at all. This is a cloud based service that’s fully managed by Qwest. They replicate your servers, applications and data on a real-time basis. When disaster strikes, availability to access your data and applications continues uninterrupted. Your office building can be blown away, flooded or burned down. The business goes on as if nothing ever happened. Thus is the magic of the cloud.
How do you pay for this? There’s a monthly fee for the service. For that you get automatic failover, continued access to applications and data, immediate remote operational capability, complete data protection, platform and application support, real-time disaster recovery tests and 24/7 support. There’s near-zero down time, no capital expense, no technological lock-in and no administrative costs. Qwest takes care of all those details. It’s like they are a duplicate IT center that you rent by the month.
Is cloud recovery something that could mean the difference between staying in business or going under in the event of a major disaster? Is it worth what it costs when you consider the implication of lost business or the capital and operating expense of doing this yourself? Why not find out quickly and easily. Get competitive quotes on cloud recovery, networking and other services now. Don’t wait until you are in real trouble. It would be too late then.
Last Updated (Tuesday, 30 November 1999 00:00)
Written by Micki Kaufman
Tuesday, 31 August 2010 00:10
Canada's incumbent telephone and cable operators must allow smaller ISPs to piggy-back on their fiber-optic broadband networks, but can charge these rivals a 10% mark-up for doing so, the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) ruled today.
Last Updated (Tuesday, 30 November 1999 00:00)
Written by Micki Kaufman
Monday, 30 August 2010 03:10
How long has it been since you took a good hard look at your telephone network? No, not just reviewing the bills for outrageous long distance usage or lines that are no longer in use. Have you taken a look recently at the map of where your phones are and how they connect to each other and the outside world?
If your organization has more than a single location, you may well have developed a spider’s web of connections that are costing you a pretty penny every month. This is especially true if your company has grown by acquisition. Whatever you have set up at headquarters is no doubt completely different from the configuration at other sites. What you have in front of you is a terrific opportunity to save money and perhaps even improve service.
I’ll suggest starting with a clean piece of paper. Draw a little circle for each of your sites, assuming there are only a few to a few dozen. This will work for any number of locations, but no need to burn through pencils trying to map them. What you want to do is draw a line that goes from location to location and back to headquarters in something resembling a circle. This will be your converged network for voice, data and even video. From there you make redundant connections to your service providers. You’ll need a couple of connections even if you have a single provider, just for a safety failover. What are you staring at now? A big cost savings, that’s what.
What I’m describing is a networking system that makes sense for medium and large scale organizations. XO communications, a highly rated competitive carrier, calls this “Enterprise SIP Trunking.” They lay out the details in their white paper on “SIP Trunking for the Enterprise”.
So what’s special about a SIP trunk and why are you missing out if you don’t have one? The idea is simple. SIP or Session Initiation Protocol is the switching language for VoIP telephone system. In small systems it is so integrated into the product that you may not even know it’s there. But for enterprise level users, what you want to do is integrate the technology of SIP trunking into your local and wide area networks. That gives you the ability to use a single network for both telephone and data transfer. One network instead of two is where the cost savings start.
The other opportunity for cost savings is to consolidate your phone connections to the outside world and stop using the public telephone network to make calls between locations. Every time you go off your network and onto the public phone system you pay a toll. It may only amount to pennies at a time, but all those internal calls will wind up generating a considerable phone bill at the end of the month.
You are also paying a pretty penny to have separate phone lines at each location. You need enough lines for each site to ensure that calls always get through. That means that most of the time you have lines sitting idle that you pay for anyway. Meanwhile, another site just got a huge burst of traffic and customers are hearing busy signals because all of those lines are in use. Wouldn’t it make more sense to create a pool of outside lines and share them among locations? That way the sites that have bursts of traffic will get the lines they need and the sites not needing those lines won’t be hoarding them just in case they’re needed.
What XO recommends is creating a MPLS-VPN network that securely connects all of your locations for voice, data and video. All phone calls within offices and between locations stay on your own network, so you don’t pay per-minute toll charges. Calls to and from outside parties go through an IP-PBX system at headquarters or a hosted PBX system at your service provider. This system assigns all of the outside lines as needed.
Does SIP Trunking make sense as a cost saver for your business or organization? Regardless of size or number of locations, there are probably ways you can save on your telecommunications costs while maintaining quality of service. Discuss your situation with one of our friendly Enterprise VoIP consultants at no charge and see what other opportunities are available to you. You’re likely to be pleasantly surprised by the results.
If your organization has more than a single location, you may well have developed a spider’s web of connections that are costing you a pretty penny every month. This is especially true if your company has grown by acquisition. Whatever you have set up at headquarters is no doubt completely different from the configuration at other sites. What you have in front of you is a terrific opportunity to save money and perhaps even improve service.I’ll suggest starting with a clean piece of paper. Draw a little circle for each of your sites, assuming there are only a few to a few dozen. This will work for any number of locations, but no need to burn through pencils trying to map them. What you want to do is draw a line that goes from location to location and back to headquarters in something resembling a circle. This will be your converged network for voice, data and even video. From there you make redundant connections to your service providers. You’ll need a couple of connections even if you have a single provider, just for a safety failover. What are you staring at now? A big cost savings, that’s what.
What I’m describing is a networking system that makes sense for medium and large scale organizations. XO communications, a highly rated competitive carrier, calls this “Enterprise SIP Trunking.” They lay out the details in their white paper on “SIP Trunking for the Enterprise”.
So what’s special about a SIP trunk and why are you missing out if you don’t have one? The idea is simple. SIP or Session Initiation Protocol is the switching language for VoIP telephone system. In small systems it is so integrated into the product that you may not even know it’s there. But for enterprise level users, what you want to do is integrate the technology of SIP trunking into your local and wide area networks. That gives you the ability to use a single network for both telephone and data transfer. One network instead of two is where the cost savings start.
The other opportunity for cost savings is to consolidate your phone connections to the outside world and stop using the public telephone network to make calls between locations. Every time you go off your network and onto the public phone system you pay a toll. It may only amount to pennies at a time, but all those internal calls will wind up generating a considerable phone bill at the end of the month.
You are also paying a pretty penny to have separate phone lines at each location. You need enough lines for each site to ensure that calls always get through. That means that most of the time you have lines sitting idle that you pay for anyway. Meanwhile, another site just got a huge burst of traffic and customers are hearing busy signals because all of those lines are in use. Wouldn’t it make more sense to create a pool of outside lines and share them among locations? That way the sites that have bursts of traffic will get the lines they need and the sites not needing those lines won’t be hoarding them just in case they’re needed.
What XO recommends is creating a MPLS-VPN network that securely connects all of your locations for voice, data and video. All phone calls within offices and between locations stay on your own network, so you don’t pay per-minute toll charges. Calls to and from outside parties go through an IP-PBX system at headquarters or a hosted PBX system at your service provider. This system assigns all of the outside lines as needed.
Does SIP Trunking make sense as a cost saver for your business or organization? Regardless of size or number of locations, there are probably ways you can save on your telecommunications costs while maintaining quality of service. Discuss your situation with one of our friendly Enterprise VoIP consultants at no charge and see what other opportunities are available to you. You’re likely to be pleasantly surprised by the results.
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