Toll Fraud Precautions
Leveraging IP Telephony for Remote Working
Private schools 'must embrace smartphones'
Children's Hospice South West
Leveraging IP Telephony for Remote Working
By Juliet Austin, Sales Manager
If you have already implemented an IP telephony platform, then in terms of creating a connected virtual organisation, the hard work is already done. You have established the central hub of your communications infrastructure and are ideally positioned to extend this to encompass your remote offices and remote workers, building towards full unified communication.
Understanding The Business Need
The first phase of an IPT deployment is often based around the head office, ensuring that the new system fulfils the needs of the office based workforce, legacy telephony requirements are met and promised benefits from voice over IP (VoIP) are being achieved.
With the central office deployment complete, now is the time to look further afield and consider two distinct sets of users:
(i) Remote Offices
How are the communication needs of your remote offices met? Do they operate their own small telephone system? Do they have their own exchange lines and numbers into these offices? Are they connected to the central office and if so, how?
(ii) Home Workers
Are you paying for business lines into your remote workers’ homes? Are they having to utilise the public telephony network to communicate with your offices? How accessible are they to your customers? Is there an underlying reliance on mobile phones?
Creating A Virtual IP Telephony Environment
A fundamental advantage of an IP based communications environment is that it does not require a proprietary fixed wire connection into your telephone system. What this means is that physical proximity is no longer required.
Think in terms of your enterprise IT applications; you do not have to provide each of your remote offices and home workers with their own server in order for them to access your core IT systems. You centralise these applications and enable your remote workforce to access them via secure Internet connections, simple, efficient and most certainly cost effective.
The same principle applies to IP Telephony. Your IPT platform is your central server and as long as your remote workers can access your corporate network either directly or securely over the Internet, then they can access this service.
Remote offices do not require their own dedicated communication platforms; low-cost IP phones are simply connected to the central system, often via a secure gateway, leveraging your Wide Area Network (WAN) provision. The same principle then applies to home based workers. They simply connect into their broadband router an IP phone or a PC based softphone and become an end-point on your centralised IP communications platform.
The Benefits Of A Seamless Virtual Communications Infrastructure
By creating a seamless virtual communication infrastructure in this manner you ensure that
- Remote workers gain all of the features and capabilities of your central communication platform and are no longer the poor relation.
- Regardless of their location, all workers appear as an extension on your central system making them easier to reach for both their colleagues and your customers.
- Direct dial numbers can be utilised for remote workers as well as central office based staff.
- Workers can easily transition between offices or their home; a single logon ensures that their communication services can follow them.
Gaining The Costs Savings Of A Virtualised Communication Infrastructure
At the same time as creating a more connected and productive workforce, implementing a virtualised communications infrastructure will save you money in several areas:
- Reduce the need and therefore the maintenance cost of remote office based telephony equipment.
- Enable you to rationalise network services centrally, equating to fewer trunks and ensuring that every call is made using the most optimum call plan.
- Remove the costs associated with public network calls between the central office and remote workers (IP calls are free).
- Reduce the cost associated with mobile phones being used as the remote telephone device.
- Simplify the management of your communications infrastructure with the ability for this to be supported and managed from one central location.
- Reduce the cost of administering expenses claims for business telephone calls.
So Is There A Downside?
Historically the only reservation regarding rolling out centralised IP based communications infrastructure to remote offices and home workers has been around quality of service. Is the network pipe large enough to support voice traffic at a quality and reliability that is acceptable to the business and its customers?
Two factors have addressed this concern. First, the VoIP and data networking technology being used is far better tuned to a converged world. Perfected Quality of Service (QoS) capability within switches and routers ensure that voice traffic gains priority and when combined with better compression algorithms, IP based voice, even when passing over the Internet, can be made carrier grade.
The second factor is bandwidth which has also been addressed with the advancement of technology. Dial up technology has been replaced by home and business broadband and every month we gain access to more bandwidth at the same or less cost. The cost of ensuring our employees have adequate access to the corporate network is now minimal and is more than taken care of by the savings in communications costs for your remote workers.
If you are ready to extend your central IP telephony platform to encompass your remote workers then you should talk to Taurus. We have created virtual communication environments for many of our customers and can help you implement a seamless, secure and reliable infrastructure.
If you would like to find out more about virtualising your IP telephony platform, please contact the Taurus Sales team on 01392 202000 or complete our on line contact sheet.
