Office Telephone Service Via Cloud

When you think of office telephone service, the thing that comes to mind is a phone on every desk with an easy 3 or 4 digit number to call other phones in-house and access to an outside line whenever you need one. Today, that picture also includes your own direct dial phone number and personal voice mail. Transfers, call forwarding and conference calls are easy to set up. So, where is the equipment that runs this phone system?

For most people, the answer is “who cares?” The actual phone system could be anywhere. As long as it works all day, every day, the mechanics of how this is accomplished is beyond the interest of all but a few people. The ones who care are the business manager who pays the phone bills, the IT person or people who quietly keep everything humming, and the provider of the service.

That provider could be the local phone company. That’s how it was for at least half of the last century. For many if not most companies, at least part of the system is in-house. This could be a small wireless phone system with a couple of lines and a half-dozen handsets. It could be a key system using desk phones with a separate button for each of 4 to 6 outside lines. It might even be a PBX phone system mounted in a back room with lines coming in from each phone and going out to the telephone company.

Since very few people are all that interested in running their own in-house telephone switching system, why not ditch the whole thing? Does that mean going back to analog phones connected to the local Telco? Not at all. Today it means going forward to a cloud based solution that will give you all the functionality you have now and more.

Cloud communications is the new PBX. It’s also the new key system and the new small office system with only a few telephones. It may even provide your broadband Internet.

The cloud telephone system is more formally known as hosted PBX or hosted VoIP. You already know what hosting is. Chances are that you already buy a hosting solution from one of the many online providers. This could be a shared solution, a virtual private server (VPS) or a dedicated server of your own. The economics of setting up your own data center just to run a web server don’t make sense anymore. There is so much competition in the hosting field that simple solutions are only a few dollars a month. Dedicated servers are only a few hundreds of dollars per month. That includes the box, the bandwidth and the IT services to keep it all running.

Larger companies that run their own customized packages for business information may have elected to just add one more server for the web to the racks they already have in their data centers. It hasn’t made much sense to go out of house for a solution when you need a large data center and staffing to optimize your business. Well, not till recently. Now these major corporations are shutting down their in-house data centers and moving to cloud computing solutions in droves. Why? For the same reasons that make sense to outsource telephone systems. You don’t need to invest in capital and you don’t need a staff to maintain it.

The point is that cloud services have evolved to the point where both your computing and your telephone can be supplied by a cloud vendor at a lower overall cost with more functionality and lower in-house staffing than doing it yourself. There are other advantages, too. You pay for a cloud telephone system per seat per month. You only buy as many seats as you need. When you need more, you order more. There is no need to maintain extra capacity just in case business picks up suddenly. Provisioning of extra resources is fast and easy because the cloud has all the capacity you need.

Now that you have office telephone solutions in the cloud as an option, is there any reason to be stuck with a technical solution that was “modern” decades ago? At the very least, take a look at what’s available in the cloud, what it costs compared to what you are paying now, and if you can get all new phones included with your service.



Note: Original photo of telephone operators courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives on Wikimedia Commons.

Vocal IP Networx Offers Free SNMP Monitoring

You’re probably used to ordering T1 lines and other bandwidth solutions. You also know that it’s up to you to know when your service is available and not available. Sometimes that’s a bit tricky because you buy the line service from one carrier, install a edge router you get from another vendor and load up the network with firewalls, servers and other devices. It’s a good thing that you are around to monitor all this 24/7. You are available 24/7 aren’t you?

Large corporations have round the clock IT staffing and their own network operations centers (NOCs). Medium and smaller size companies wing it overnight and plan on dealing with issues as they arise. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get some help in monitoring your network operations without it costing you a fortune?

Vocal IP Networx, a leader in IP telephony solutions and services, may have the answer to your need. They are offering free 24/7 SNMP monitoring of every circuit and deployed customer premises equipment (CPE) supplied by Vocal IP Networx. Their state of the art NOC keeps close watch and responds to outages and potential devices failures, even before a problem manifests itself.

Here’s something even more impressive. Vocal practices what they call “open book” management, meaning that you, as a customer, have access to their monitoring system via a secure Web portal. No need to wonder what’s going on when you can log in and see for yourself anytime.

Here’s some of what Vocal IP Networx monitors: Processor load, current memory use, priority queue levels, overheating, bandwidth utilization and spikes, plus interface errors.

SNMP stands for Simple Network Management Protocol. It is an industry standard protocol defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). When SNMP is running on a network, there are 3 components involved. The first is the managed device, of course. That could be a router, firewall, switch, server or other network element. Agent software is installed on the managed device to gather the data and process it for presentation. At the other end of the line is Network Management System (NMS) software that queries the managed devices.

You may have hear of Vocal IP Networx as a provider of high performance hosted PBX business telephone solutions. One good reason that they enjoy a high performance reputation is that Vocal goes way beyond just providing a switching system for your SIP phones. They offer the entire solution, including private lines, dedicated Internet access and nationwide MPLS service.

Having control of the WAN network plus the managed network devices is a huge advantage in ensuring quality of service. The SNMP monitoring is just part of that. Engineering the solution in the first place to ensure that traffic is properly prioritized into classes of service and that there is sufficient bandwidth and minimal latency, jitter and packet loss is what it takes to confidently go with hosted communications services for your important business needs.

Would you feel more confident knowing that your service provider is monitoring not just the equipment at their end, but the entire network back to your facilities? That’s available as a free bonus when you select Vocal IP Networx as your provider. Get competitive quotes for Vocal IP Networx and other high quality service providers for WAN bandwidth line services and hosted VoIP phone service. You may be surprised to find out that you can get higher performance and more reliable service for what you are paying now.



Note: Image of network operations center courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Cloud Hosting Providers For Converged Networks

Cloud computing services are growing geometrically. If you haven’t gotten on-board yet, it’s probably because you aren’t convinced of the cost savings, security or the ability of the cloud to cover all bases for your IT needs. That picture is changing rapidly. Let’s take a snapshot of what’s available now for SMB users.

When we think of cloud computing, the picture that comes to mind is one of a giant brain in the sky that runs operations for hundreds or thousands of companies. That’s the approach that gets all the press, but it’s far from the entirety of the market. Indeed, there are many other providers out there who can deliver the virtual services you need on a less grand scale. You may not be able to get everything from one service provider, but the building blocks are out there to handle your voice and data needs.

That’s important, because enterprise VoIP solutions are driving a trend toward converged networks. If you only consider moving traditional data center servers to the cloud, you’ll be missing a big piece of the puzzle. The other trend that’s important is fixed mobile convergence that integrates cell phones into your telecom infrastructure. Mobility can be the link that makes or breaks your productivity in the future.

The foundation of cloud computing is cloud hosting that incorporates Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Cloud infrastructure is virtualization on steroids. IT departments have found that virtualizing servers ups the efficiency of the physical server hardware. What cloud computing does is greatly expand the virtualization to include huge racks of high performance servers plus storage and bandwidth. It differs from the virtualization that you would do yourself or the virtual servers you’d rent from a colocation center in that it is sold incrementally on-demand. You pay by the minute, by the hour or by the number of CPU cycles used.

Another characteristic of cloud hosting is that it is highly elastic or scalable. If you start to run out of capacity, you simply order up more virtual servers. The cloud operating system takes care of how these resources work in concert to provide the capacity you need. At no point do you have to purchase, install or maintain any equipment. The cloud service provider takes care of this with a 24/7 technical staff.

There are actually three types of clouds to choose from. The one that first comes to mind is the public cloud that serves many users simultaneously. You gain access via a private line or dedicated Internet service. Companies that have highly sensitive applications, unique requirements or simply want more control go with a private cloud. That is a similar infrastructure to the public cloud but on a scale suitable for one company. The hybrid cloud is a combination of the two. Public facing or non-critical applications run on the public cloud, while a separate private cloud handles very sensitive applications.

While cloud computing is thought of a data processing service, there is also a voice cloud known as cloud communications or hosted PBX. In this case, the computing resources are specific to telephony needs and the connectivity is by SIP trunk from your location and to the public switched telephone network from the provider. You no longer need a PBX phone system in-house or any telephone trunk lines. What you have is SIP telephones connected to your network and a converged SIP trunk from your business location or locations to the service provider. Some hosted PBX systems integrate cell phones into the system so that you have the same capabilities while mobile as at your desk.

Some of the cloud services you can readily get include cloud hosting, hosted PBX, unified communications, enterprise cloud security, private/public clouds, cloud storage, hosted Exchange, SharePoint, disaster recovery, anti-spam and anti-virus, hosted firewalls, and dedicated cloud access connections.

Are you feeling that you may be missing out on productivity improvements, cost savings, agility of scaling your business, or advanced features available in the cloud? This would be a good time to explore options with multiple cloud hosting providers. You can start small and grow or make a step-change relocation to the cloud, depending on what works best for your company.

Cloud Hosting vs VPS

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) are a hosting solution for web sites that have grown beyond shared hosting service but don’t quite require the expense and support that comes with running a completely private server. Now there is another choice that lets you scale up and down rapidly and lets you pay only for what you use.

That answer is cloud server hosting. We’re hearing a lot of buzz about cloud computing versus running your own data center. Many companies never got to the point of investing in an full-fledged in-house data center. They don’t even get to the point of installing a rack in the back room with a few servers for web hosting, email and the like. Why? Because outsourcing all that to hosting services has become too attractive.

The smallest companies, like those run by independent professionals, small retailers, design firms and others, most likely begin with a customized template site offered by a local web services company that also provides the hosting. As they grow beyond the “brochure” site stage or want to get into their own design and hosting, they sign up with one of the low cost hosting services you find online, such as HostGator. When you’re paying less than $4 a month for a hosting plan, there’s not much incentive to do it all yourself

How can companies offer hosting for so little and still make money? The low cost hosting plans are all in the category of shared hosting. The control panel gives you the illusion that you have a server all to yourself. Not by a long shot. There can be dozens or even hundreds of other websites that you are unaware of all on that same server. Your only indication that others are using resources is that the site may run slower at times. If you use too many resources, you hosting company may contact you to say you’ve outgrown the shared hosting plan and need to move up to a virtual private server.

What’s a virtual private server? It’s the intermediate step between shared hosting and having a dedicated server all to yourself. A dedicated server gives you a complete machine with processor, memory and disk storage all under your control. It also means you have to pay for and manage an expensive resource. If you don’t need all those those resources, they just go to waste. If you need more, you have to contract for a larger dedicated server or a cluster of servers. That gets very pricey very fast.

VPS hosting takes advantage of virtualization software. A physical server is logically partitioned into a number of virtual servers. Each one looks and acts like a stand-alone physical server. Only you and your hosting service know that you are running a virtual server rather than a private one. The cost is much less because the physical hardware is being shared among multiple virtual private servers.

Virtual private servers not only give you more resources, but you’ll also get full root access so you can install whatever software you want and customize it to your heart’s content. You still have the limitation of sharing a physical machine and the difficulty of scaling up or down if your requirements change.

Enter cloud hosting. The idea behind cloud computing is that someone else has created a gigantic pool of resources that includes processors, RAM memory, hard drives and bandwidth. Rather than sell you a fixed chunk of this pool, they rent access to it. The same virtualization principles that you have with virtual private hosting apply, but the resource pool is nearly infinitely deep. That means you can easily scale to meet your current needs and ramp up or down later on if things change.

Cloud hosting servers are available with your choice of Linux or Windows operating systems, guaranteed commitment of CPU cycles, RAM and hard disk space, hardware redundancy for high reliability, full root/administrative access, dedicated IP address, automatic nightly data backups, and the ability to add familiar control panels such as cPanel and WHM. For all this you pay by the hour for what you use and there is no commitment, contracts or setup fees. If you don’t need one or more servers, just cancel them without penalty.

What type of hosting works best for your company? Most organizations will do well to compare VPS, collocated private servers and cloud hosting options. Get prices and features to decide the best solution for your business.

New Phoenix Data Center Offers Colocation Services

Data centers are expanding as the business climate improves and companies pursue productivity increases and lower costs. Many businesses that never gave a second thought to using colocation facilities are taking another look. In the Southwest USA, a good place to consider is the new PAETEC Data Center in Phoenix, Arizona.

PAETEC has just cut the ribbon on their 4,400 square foot Phoenix data center as part of an expansion program that adds to their facilities in Bethlehem and Conshohocken, PA, Andover, MA., Houston, TX and Milwaukee, WI. Why? Customer demand. The role of Information Technology is changing and the “cloud” has a lot to do with it. PAETEC is positioning itself to capitalize on this movement with services that improve business continuity, information safeguarding, network latency reduction and a reduction of management needs.

The idea behind the cloud is one of economy of scale. You can have every company buying servers and racks, putting them in environmentally controlled rooms, providing the electrical power for both equipment and the cooling needed to take away the heat generated by the equipment, and hiring a staff to tend to the data center facilities. Alternatively, you can have a service provider create a much bigger facility and let companies buy their computing and storage services for a fee.

This is what cloud service providers do. They figure out the IT services that are common to many businesses and then provide those as a service themselves. But isn’t that six of one and a half dozen of another? How is the cloud a net saver of anything?

This is where economy of scale comes into play. The cost of operating a cloud services company doesn’t go up linearly with size. You need a certain amount of real estate, electrical power, HVAC, bandwidth and staffing to create a data center of any size. Having twice as many servers, disk drives and network appliances doesn’t necessarily mean you need to double your staff. Yes, you’ll need more floor space, air conditioning, electrical power and backup generation, but it probably won’t cost twice as much. The same is true for bandwidth. It gets cheaper by the Mbps and Gbps when you order big lines compared to little ones. Your staff can also be more specialized, since they are only dealing with a certain range of facilities and a defined set of services.

The contrast is even more dramatic when you compare the startup cost for small companies to create their own IT services compared to simply purchasing what is needed from a company that already has the facilities and expertise. Web site hosting, for instance, has gotten so cheap when purchased from a large hosting service that small businesses are hard pressed to justify buying and running their own servers. Many of them are now finding that offloading their telephone systems to a Hosted PBX service saves investment and staffing.

The colocation center fits somewhere in-between running your own facilities and outsourcing to the cloud. The colo offers the economy of scale for environmentally controlled and secure server space and WAN bandwidth. Yet, you have the option of providing your own equipment that you maintain yourself. Some colocation providers are now offering cloud-like services that include renting servers and storage they already have available and handling maintenance and repair through their 24/7 technical staff.

Should you be going to the cloud or relocating to a colocation facility instead of trying to do it all yourself? It may be time for a quick study to compare the capital and expense costs that you pay now with the monthly fees to get the same services outside. Get complementary support for pricing and availability of cloud and colocation services so you can do a good job.



Note: Photo of Phoenix skyline courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.