Business telephone migration to VoIP from a traditional landline/PBX can be painfully complicated if you don’t know what you’re doing. You know it will improve your business mobility, business continuity and bottom line, however there are six key things you need to watch out for before you plan your VoIP migration.

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.” ~ Dr Seuss

Why choose hosted VoIP?

But first, let’s look at why you’d want to move your business phones from a traditional landline to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP):

• It supports mobile working and BYOD policies
• It’s cheaper: you avoid CapEx, and instead pay a monthly subscription for what you need
• You get improved call quality with faster broadband
• It boosts business efficiency and productivity

And also:

• It’s suitable for businesses of all sizes
• It’s hassle-free
• It supports growth
• It’s in the cloud, so your business can continue to function no matter what – through flood or fire or mobile working

In May 2014, we covered the key reasons why businesses should switch to hosted VoIP in some depth. If you haven’t already, you can read about them in this blog: Why switch to VoIP for business?

You’ve decided to migrate to hosted VoIP; what next?

So now to the crux of the matter. Here are the six critical questions to ask when moving your business telephones to hosted VoIP.

1. Is my broadband good enough?

VoIP 100% relies on good internet bandwidth to transfer call data. So a slow internet connection will immediately affect the quality of your call.

2. What length of contract best suits my business?

Doubtless, you’ll be looking to minimise the monthly cost of your business VoIP. You’ll always find the cheapest rates if you commit to longer time-scales, so look for a provider that offers 12-, 24- and 36-month contracts. With the flexibility of cloud, you can add extra licences on a month-by-month basis, according to your business requirements, so you only pay for what you need. Opt for a rolling contract, and – while you’ll have more flexibility – you’ll pay premium prices.

3. What level of customer support does my business need?

Alongside email, your phone communications most likely underpin your functionality as a business. It’ll be critical for customer enquiries and sales activities. As with traditional PBX – or landline – any problems will immediately have repercussions in the form of frustrated customers and depleted sales.

This is where a top-rate, UK based customer service will make a world of difference. In this day and age there really is no reason for prolonged – if any – service disruption. There’s also the added benefit of a 24-hour ability to change any of your settings, such as auto-attendant options, hunt groups and call forwarding.

4. What hardware does my business need?

When migrating to business VoIP you’ll need to ditch your traditional analogue phones. It sounds wasteful, I know, but unfortunately they aren’t forward compatible. Business grade handsets offer high definition call quality on a secure network protected from hackers.

5. How mobile do we need to be?

Some service providers limit their packages to certain devices. Work out what your business needs and go from there. With a robust and compliant cloud solution for your industry, you should be able to access your hosted VoIP services from your PCs, laptops, tablets and mobile phones – wherever you have a suitable internet connection.

6. What hidden costs do I need to be aware of?

Make sure you’ve looked into costs. Go for per-second billing as opposed to per-minute billing – that’ll make your monthly expenditure a lot more attractive.

What you should expect from your business VoIP provider

So you’ve covered the six key bases and may well have chosen your VoIP provider. Now you just need to make sure they will provide you with:

• A telephony audit and cost analysis
• Solution design and call route planning
• Number porting
• Smooth implementation and early use support
• Product training

Microsoft Office 365 is essentially all your familiar Office applications, but hosted in the cloud. It supports business mobility and the Bringing Your Own Device (BYOD) for work model, as you can access your office from anywhere, on any device and at any time. Security is addressed with encryption and intrusion monitoring. But how can you make sure you’re choosing the right Office 365 provider for your business? For example, what happens if you hit downtime and need to get your email back up immediately?

Why Office 365 is good for business mobility and BYOD

Before we look at the six critical questions you need to ask when considering the best Office 365 package for your business, let’s look at how Office 365 has great advantages for today’s modern business.

• Office 365 goes where you do: no matter where you are, your files, email, calendar, contacts, IM, online meetings and team sites go with you.
• It works across all your devices – for example your tablet, laptop, iPhone or Android.
• It’s fresh and familiar: the suite of Office apps are always up-to-date.
• It’s secure: you data is protected against malware, spam, phishing attacks and other threats.
• It’s available 24/7.
• Exchange Online makes your email accessible on your own devices. There are no major firewall changes and no Exchange servers are required.
• With Microsoft WebApps and a plug into Outlook, you can edit, collaborate and share documents in ABC and – in one click – attach a public link to emails. All while on the move.
• With Lync, you can communicate from your own devices, connect, share desktops and hold online meetings.

Six essential questions to ask when choosing your Office 365 package

So here’s the crux of it all. If you’re considering moving to Office 365 to support your business mobility and BYOD programme – or for any other reason – we think it’s important to ask yourself the following six questions.

1. Customer service: will you get the speed and quality of customer service support that you need?

Say, for example, you’re about to present at a client’s office and go to download the email with your presentation document on it when you realise your email is down. The obvious solution would be to call up Microsoft and ask them to fix it asap. But you haven’t paid for the top level of support, so you’re given a ticket and placed in a queue. Your important meeting is over long before your email is back up and running.

Make sure you have the level of support that suits your business requirements. Cloud Direct is a Microsoft cloud services provider (CSP) partner, so we can offer our highly-responsive 24/7 services on top of Microsoft’s basic package. So our customers get the best of both worlds.

2. Data security & privacy: are you comfortable that your cloud services provider will give your business data an acceptable level of security and privacy?

If yours is a small to medium business, you’re likely to experience better security using Office 365 than you can (probably) afford on your own. But, if security is paramount to your business, make sure your data is always recoverable and compliant with legal and industrial regulations. You should consider ISO 27001 accredited backup and disaster recovery.

3. Data uptime: will you get acceptable uptime and accessibility of your data?

Microsoft guarantees data uptime of 99.9%, which may be fine for some organisations, however the impact of downtime can be severe – especially if you’re in a heavily regulated industry such as financial or legal services, healthcare, energy or government.

We have addressed this with our offer of additional security for Office 365 that should afford you greater uptime. This means both productivity and legal requirements are addressed – you can keep working on the move, confident that you aren’t risking your business with a lower level of support.

4. Retrieving your data: if your cloud services provider stops offering one or more of the services, do you know how – or if – you can get your data back?

Your data is critical to your business success. Make sure you find out what the process is in this scenario, and make sure you’re happy with it.

5. Business exposure: if you stop paying your provider, do you have a mechanism to access everything your business depends on?

Don’t risk your intellectual property by getting caught out in a data grey zone. Make sure you know the answer and that your business is protected.

6. Your employees are, in fact your biggest threat. So have you got a BYOD policy in place?

Having said the first five points, in fact, when it comes to business mobility and a BYOD model, your service provider is not the most likely to be the cause of business disruption. Your biggest threats, in fact, are your own staff and associates.

“Nearly a third of smartphone users who bring their own devices into the workplace have suffered a security issue and not told their boss”. ~ a Gartner study

In the same study, Gartner found that only 15 per cent of respondents had signed any kind of BYOD usage agreement, and a worrying 59 per cent of employees are using their own devices in the workplace with no formal agreements or controls in place.

With the Information Commissioners Office threatening fines of up to half a million pounds for a serious breach of the Data Protection Act, a BYOD policy is a corporate must-have. Check out this blog: BYOD security risks.

You can download our BYOD policy template here. You’re welcome to edit and brand the template according to your specific organisation’s requirements.

Millie doesn’t have time to worry about cybercrime; she’s trying to run her business. But she knows that faster attacks, more files held for ransom, and a snake pit of malicious code doing the rounds are all putting her increasingly mobile business at risk. Luckily for Millie, her IT manager is switched on to endpoint protection, keeping her business safe from data corruption, data breaches and data loss. Here’s what happened one day in the life of Thoroughly Mobile Millie.

08:00 hours – Millie avoids opening a phishing email

As Millie unwinds after her gym workout, she takes 20 minutes over a coffee to check her emails.  In the midst of them, she finds one from her malware and virus detection software app, warning her against a potential threat. Not recognising the sender, she chooses to blacklist the email.

Smart decision.

Had it not been for the real-time detection model her IT manager set up, in a millisecond, she could’ve exposed her business and contacts to data corruption via the latest evolution of email attack.

Unlike traditional detection models, this endpoint protection module uses file pattern and predictive behaviour recognition, scanning all emails superfast, protecting the business without slowing down Millie’s busy day.

At the same time, Millie’s IT manager is able to access the app’s Web-based portal to manage and report on the entire company’s activities, without having to worry about onsite server hardware or software, and the hassles of managing daily signatures or updates.

09:00 hours – Millie arrives in the office to discover an employee has lost their iPad

It’s what we all dread. Losing a laptop, smartphone or tablet with sensitive customer data – not to mention business data. Every year, thousands of business devices are lost or stolen, exposing organisations to the risk of data breaches, fines from the ICO – damaging business reputations and customer confidence.

However, with their endpoint protection set-up, Millie’s IT manager quickly steps in to lockdown the device and wipe sensitive data. He’s easily able to monitor and secure activity without compromising the mortified employee’s privacy.

11:00 hours – Millie welcomes three new recruits, already governed by endpoint protection

Millie’s business is flexible. It has to be. So as employee numbers grows, contract and grow again, their endpoint protection scales accordingly. This keeps her business secure and compliant with data governance and industry regulations.

And it’s all managed by her IT manager, from one central point. He’s also supported with out-of-the-box advanced system reporting, automated report generation, delivery and proactive metric-based backup management.

12:00 hours – Millie travels to a meeting with her lawyers, and needs to access files on the way

In the taxi on the way to meeting with her lawyer, Millie and a colleague need to make some last-minute changes to a document. A quick Skype for Business message exchange with a colleague in the office directs them to the file, which they access, collaborate on with their office-based colleague, amend and save. Changes are effected immediately and accessible across the business, to both office and remote workers alike. It’s also backed up. This means Millie’s business continues to work at the speed required, they’re productive and there’s no need to waste their IT manager’s budget or time – support costs are minimised.

13:00 hours – Lawyers can get the information they need quickly – with the Legal Hold application

Finding the right data you need quickly is no easy task for any legal team. With the best endpoint protection package for the business, Millie’s IT manager has made data retrieval fast and secure.

With compliant seven-year archiving and eDiscovery, the information the lawyers need is found quickly, saving Millie further the need to pay for costly consultants, legal services and third party tools. It automates and centralises backup and search of data across devices. So IT and legal teams can easily identify, collect, preserver and review potential data internally.

16:00 hours – Millie’s management team reviews their ISO 27001 compliance requirements

With the case meeting out of the way, Millie heads back to the office for a compliance meeting with her management team. To help them keep customers and win new business in an increasingly competitive business environment, Mille is keen to assure her customers of her business commitment to keeping their data secure.

Using the same backup package that protects business critical information of more than four million other corporate users, Millie is able to provide that guarantee with ISO 27001 data security protection.  Advanced encryption and other top-level security procedures and protocols safeguard her business data at all times – during transmission, storage and recovery.

22:30 hours – With endpoint protection, Millie and her IT manager have peace of mind

Safe in the knowledge that the business is protected 24/7, Millie and her IT manager can get a good night’s sleep. (Even though someone, somewhere, is working out a new way to disrupt this…)

£230million. At its worst, that’s how much last winter’s weather was *estimated to cost UK small-medium businesses in a single day. A frustrating **two-fifths of those businesses are now likely to fail in the next two years. A cloud backup and Disaster Recovery solution can stop this happening to your organisation. Here’s how.

“It is only in sorrow bad weather masters us; in joy we face the storm and defy it”~ Amelia Barr

According to telecoms provider, Daisy Group plc, nearly a third (31%) of UK businesses have been affected by bad weather over the last two years. Transport problems, power cuts or broadband and phone line failures are all to blame. Last year, bad weather prevented an estimated three million UK workers from completing their normal work responsibilities.

That’s a pretty gloomy picture, right?

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The sunshine behind the cloud: cloud backup and disaster recovery

With cloud backup and disaster recovery in place, the impact of the weather fades dramatically. Why? Because, as long as you have access to the Internet via broadband or 3/4G wireless connections, you can keep up communications and proceed with business as usual – albeit maybe with limited capabilities initially. But either way, your telephone, email, internet connection, power, data and servers are all accessible and under control.

Such a resilient cloud disaster recovery set-up means that, if disaster strikes, you’re ahead of the game. And the faster you get your business back in business, the less your reputation and finances suffer.

Speed: as fast as Hermes, the winged messenger

In the event of a disaster, cloud technology is fast. It reduces recovery times from hours or days to just minutes. Remote access to backed up data means, amongst other things, you no longer have to physically transfer tapes to offsite stand-by sites. You can also recover servers and applications much more quickly, significantly limiting business downtime – which you want to avoid like the plague. The longer you’re unable to operate, the more damaging it is for your business – both financially, and for your reputation.

Guaranteed: as wise as Athena, goddess of wisdom

It’s smart to make sure you have a guarantee behind your data and IT systems recovery. A simple automated appliance can: sit on your server and capture snapshots of it; convert them into virtual rescue images; test their integrity; and test invocation and rescue. This daily process will ensure your business continuity through a disaster.

But make sure you get a convincing SLA and guaranteed 30-day transition period, so your systems are fully tested in your environment before switching back fully to your usual system.

Security – as controlled as Zeus, king of the gods

Your server snapshots should be protected during capture, transfer and storage with encryption and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technologies. However, for the highest possible protection of your data and systems, what you really want is a service provider that is overlaid end-to-end ISO 27001 security processes, which are independently audited.

Reliability – as steady as wine-loving Bacchus is not!

The cloud is reliable. It avoids introducing risk through human error as it eliminates many of the complex, manual steps that traditional recovery solutions require.

Cost – as accurate as Artemis’s hunting bow

The cloud makes the most of your financial investment. You don’t need to pay for your own hardware just for it to sit idle.

Scalability – as smart in business as Hermes, god of trade

Cloud solutions are easily scalable, so you can expand or contract recovery capabilities on demand, without having to pay for services you don’t need. This is a massive benefit for SMBs.

Accessible – as accessible as Aphrodite’s skirts, but in a good way

Because you don’t need to make a massive investment in hardware or in-house specialised recovery knowledge, cloud services (the good ones) put SMBs in a position to adopt an enterprise-level solution that otherwise would be beyond their reach. So not only do cloud solutions require less financial and resourcing investment, they also enable SMBs to achieve the same type of recovery times, recovery points and security levels as large enterprises.

Your entire business in the cloud: phones, emails and calendars

Cloud backup and disaster recovery will give you the confidence that you can maintain business some form of business continuity, no matter the weather. But ultimately, you can run your entire business from the cloud.

All your phone settings, call routings, apps and configurations are saved remotely, in the cloud, so you can still access and manage your phone system from any location with an Internet connection. Unlike the early days of Voice over Internet Protocol, when users could only access a VoIP network from a computer, today you can access it from business handsets and any mobile device with an Internet connection.

The same goes for your email and calendar. For example, with the Microsoft Office 365 suite of cloud solutions, you can access your email, calendar and contacts from any device. You can even conference or collaborate on files with your teams in real time, regardless of physical location. So, if you’ve had to disperse your teams to locations that aren’t your primary site, your people can still keep working and communicating in way that should appear seamless to clients and customers.

The cloud can also provide resilience for your internet connection, with failover that ensures that if one internet connection fails for whatever reason, you will maintain a seamless connection, ensuring business as usual – even wirelessly with 3 and 4G.

To find out how our business continuity/disaster recovery solutions work, check out this two-minute video: