Page 3 - Telecom Reseller FebMar 2017

February/March 2017
Telecom Reseller 3
THE LATEST
TECH BLOGS
TR
TELECOM RESELLER .COM
SUBSCRIPTIONS & CIRCULATION
SE 28th Street, Vancouver, WA 98683 Call: 561-732-2335
E-mail: publisher@usernews.com
ADVERTISING
Call: 360 260-9708 Toll Free: 800 667-8965 E-mail: publisher@usernews.com
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Please e-mail articles and press releases as attachments in Microsoft Word format to jeffowen@telecomreseller.com. Suggested length is 250-300 words. At the end of the article, please provide contact information. Do not send graphics. We reserve the right to edit for content and length. For further clarification, please visit www.telecomreseller.com and click on Submission Guidelines. Our Editorial Calendar (also online) is useful for appropriate subject matter.
Editor & Publisher
Douglas Green – publisher@usernews.com Associate Publisher & Director of Advertising
Carole Sangiorgio – carole@usernews.com Accounting
Tracy Titus – accounts@telecomreseller.com Assistant Editor
Amy Ralls – amyralls@telecomreseller.com Graphic Design
Raspberry Jam Creative – www.raspberryjamcreative.co.uk
The publishers of this newspaper assume no responsibility for statements made by advertisers. in their advertisements, nor do they assume responsibility for statements or opinions expressed or implied in the columns of this newspaper.
The Missing Piece In The Reseller Paradigm Why Having A Dedicated Ivr Voice Talent Could Be Your Secret Weapon
SMITH
by Allison Smith, professional telephone voice and owner of The IVR Voice (www.theivrvoice. com)
You sold a system, and your customer is excited about getting it up and running. All pre-planning of the call ow is done; lines have been con gured and extensions assigned.
Just before the system is prepped to go live, the realization hits both you and your client at the same time: Someone’s going to have to voice it.
SMITH continuesonpage 8 ››
TOM CROSS
DAVID BYRD
ALAN PERCY
THERESA SZCZUREK
Staying Steady In Cloudy Skies: Preserving Business Continuity In An Increasingly O-Premises World
“S
FULTON
by Heidi E. Fulton, Founder and Chief Creator of Blooming Perspectives (www. bloomingperspectives.com)
hould we send more of our workload into the cloud, or should we bring it all back?”
of disaster recovery strategies, particularly in a large organization, faces challenges as it scales to higher levels of abstraction and broader arrays of business needs. e very complication involved in building such a plan becomes the plan’s biggest liability, as computing costs and the complexities of network design make the DR plan more costly and time consuming to implement.
Even worse, no one really has a clear picture of how the whole plan works. Between the planning, documentation, number of people involved, divisions between on-premises application hosting and colocation, so ware maintenance and network implementation, the many abstractions balkanize the one grand plan into lots of little plans. Anything that doesn’t work or isn’t fully understood is labeled as a risk, noted and documented, and set aside to
be addressed later. And when a hurricane or earthquake inevitably strikes, only then is the plan truly put to the test.
As your DR plans grows in complexity, these challenges simply compound. ese risk gaps are where cloud services o en nd their most value, and represent some of the best returns on cloud solution investments.
ey include:
● Specialty or real time applications at high abstraction levels. In a very large organization, your IT department may not be fully aware of every parameter of every so ware application. Specialty customized so ware with unique data or networking demands will inevitably escape the notice of even the best DR plan. is is particularly true for real time communication infrastructures that require low latency and exible network con gurations, but that exceed the continuity scope of traditional backup and failover architectures.
● Workload portability. When a data center experiences outage, your business needs the ability to rapidly shi its service workload to its failover environment. For many applications, such as contact centers, the demands of
real time computing make it di cult to
achieve the necessary instantaneous transfer without signi cant investments in network infrastructure. In a modern cloud environment, the network components themselves can be easily virtualized, build into a so ware driven network that can fail over with no interruption at all. With a combination of SIP trunking, virtualized networks and the right cloud solutions, your contact center workloads can even transfer real time voice, without any mid- call interruption or call integrity degradation.
● Resource elasticity. In any organization, resource demands uctuate over time. In many cases, cyclical market changes – by season, economic conditions, or market demands
– result in regular increases or decreases of resource needs, and yet, most enterprise IT infrastructures remain dependent on static network routes and xed computing resource pools. In a virtualized cloud computing environment, strict so ware emulations
of Ethernet components such as switches, network cards, rewalls and routers allow for easy resource scaling through simple so ware
recon gurations.
Traditional backup and failover disaster
recovery methods not only can increase operational risk in these situations, but also fail to take advantage of the major opportunities that these cloud features o er.
A whole new conversation then must begin. One not built around hype cycles and favored so ware solutions, but instead about your most important business processes and the network application scope necessary to support them
in a continuous and reliable manner. Rather than reacting to disaster, this approach to cloud strategy sets out to build a real time IT infrastructure that supports uninterrupted workload and service quality – regardless of what is happening in the world outside your walls.
THE BIGGER PICTURE OF BUSINESS CONTINUITY
Should you move your workload into the cloud? A better question is this: are your plans going
to primarily focus on preserving and improving your business processes, or only to recover from losing them a er a disaster?
To remain competitive today, modern businesses must be proactive, and virtualized cloud solutions o er exceptional advantages for proactively optimizing and protecting critical computing assets. e key is to move the discussion away from disasters and towards continuity.
We recommend asking questions that better t this wider world of virtualized business.
●Are your real time communication systems currently well supported by your existing disaster recovery planning? If your contact center fails, how long will it take to reliably transfer your workload to your secondary center and resume operations? is process should be immediate, preferably without anyone noticing that an interruption has occurred.
● What are your needs on a risk assessment level? Not all applications or business processes are mission critical, or represent high levels
of risk in the event of failure. In addition, regulatory compliance and data privacy issues add variable risk factors to IT network planning. Deciding to move something to the cloud, or
to bring it back, is a nuanced discussion largely framed around speci c risk requirements.
●Which applications can best pro t from being located in a cloud environment?
O en the best prospects for cloud hosting are commoditized applications, the o - the-shelf so ware suites that involve little
to no customization or third party service integrations. Real time voice and video communications systems are also excellent choices for cloud hosting. Far from being
a cheaper alternative to colocation, a cloud environment is a unique computing framework that provides the best results when used with cloud-aware applications. Some applications are best le on premises, while others are better hosted virtually. e key is in knowing the di erence.
How well are your existing disaster recovery plans addressing these issues? ●
Much of today’s computing services industry touts virtualized data center technology - the cloud - as a one-size- ts-all answer to the many ills and risks that businesses struggle with every day. Like many advances, the cloud as
a concept means di erent things to di erent people, oscillating between being seen as the one solution that xes everything and the one option that doesn’t seem to fully satisfy anyone.
At CRI, we are o en asked by our customers if a transition to the cloud is worth it. To
that, we can only ask: do you understand
what the cloud is? Rather than existing as a single technology - a pinnacle rather than a foundation - “the cloud” in reality can mean anything from a comprehensive suite of As-A-Service (XaaS) computing options, to
a solution that bears a striking resemblance
to conventional colocation. So whether you choose to depend on cloud technology for the bulk of your business needs or instead prefer to keep your workload under your own roof, the cloud question is rarely as simple as a basic yes-or-no dilemma.
Disaster recovery, one of the most popular uses for cloud solutions today, is an excellent case example of the limitations of viewing the cloud dilemma from a yes-or-no perspective. It was one of the earliest applications of virtualized application technology, and as such, provides
us with a very sophisticated experience base
for discussing practical cloud decisions. Business continuity is the one need that we
all have in common, and cloud solutions have had a powerful impact on how organizations everywhere pursue the goal of surviving when times get tough.
Sometimes advancement is about doing the same things better. But other times, the best course of action is to simply do something di erent. And when the time is right to make decisions about your business in the cloud,
it helps to look at everything from a new perspective.
DISASTER RECOVERY WHILE WAITING FOR DISASTER
In the traditional world of disaster recovery, data backups and fail over solutions o en provide
an illusion of business process protection rather than a solid guarantee of survival. e core reason for this is that a large time gap typically exists between the development of a disaster recovery plan and the actual execution of the plan. Disasters don’t happen on schedules or are subject to budget plans.
at is not to say that sophisticated and practical DR plans don’t exist, or that they don’t work. ey do. But a comprehensive portfolio