Louis Hayner, CSO, Alteva – www.altevatel.com
The acceptance of hosted technology has increased to a point where people aren’t as scared as they used to be when it comes to the management of a particular solution – the hosted vs. premises debate. In some instances, it might make more sense for a Fortune 500 company to maintain their own cloud, but for a small business, it’s usually easier and more affordable for them to leverage a hosted solution and have someone else handle the implementation, the maintenance and any future upgrades.
Education is crucial. Unfortunately, not all clouds are created equal and it’s common to get some pushback when selling the cloud. I’ve learned that the most common pushback is all about whether or not the customer is educated about the cloud. They may have seen a commercial about Microsoft and the cloud and they want to know what is it and how does a cloud-based solution work? An additional concern customers might have is how their current infrastructure and current technology deployment rates to what you as the service provider are offering. Many times people aren’t interested in replacing everything they have. For example, a business might already have on-premises Exchange for email and does not want to buy hosted Exchange, but they can still take advantage of the Broadworks platform or a hosted OCS solution.
It’s important to understand exactly what your provider’s cloud solution brings to the table and how it integrates today. Be sure to research different hosted service providers and their offerings. Choosing a seasoned cloud solution will give you access to a tremendous amount of development components that have already been proven. These pre-developed components can be easily adapted to work with any business process to get businesses integrated and realizing efficiencies in a fraction of the time and expense of what a premises-based solution costs.
Another common misconception is security in the cloud. One of the major benefits in going with a hosted system is that there is no on-premises closet to secure. This may vary from hosted providers, but your communications system should be located in secure data centers that have both biometric and key card access security to enter. Alteva utilizes a Department of Defense Certified Firewall to protect their customer’s network and an ACME Packet SBC to protect our backend infrastructure. These SBCs are specialized voice firewalls that segregate partitions of memory, processing, and firewalling. As customers successfully register to our infrastructure, they are placed in an “untrusted” partition for a period of time. The longer the company/phones are in the “untrusted” with no issues, they are then promoted to the “trusted” partitions. New registrations that have not successfully authenticated are placed into a denied partition. Each partition is provisioned a portion of memory, processing, and firewalling functionality. Denial of Service attacks are not effective as they cannot access the “untrusted” and “trusted” partitions.
An additional measure to protect business customers from intrusion could include installing 802.1q VLANs in the LAN to completely separate the voice and data communication in the local network. You would have to have network based access to be able to try any snooping of the network. A company’s switch network should be physically secure and inaccessible to non IT users. This would be the same physical security that would need to be in place for an in house PBX system so that could not be compromised.
Job Security for IT Managers. Another concern of businesses with moving to the cloud is will it put their IT professionals out of a job. It will not. In fact, utilizing a cloud solution should make your IT person better at what they do in a more sufficient way. As opposed to managing and monitoring a system that they don’t have control over to begin with, the cloud communications concept will actually allow them to gain more control rather than lose it. Because companies’ service is in the cloud, upgrades are provided automatically in the background. The service provider simply notifies customers that new capabilities are available as they are implemented. Let the service provider be responsible for all of the backend platforms while your IT Manager can manage that vendor relationship.
When applications are delivered from the cloud, the solutions promise quicker times for deployment, and they are far easier to manage and monitor. Additional benefits unique to cloud-based UC and VoIP technologies include extensive features, disaster recovery capabilities, carrier-level call control and consolidated billing – a few of the key benefits that far surpass the concerns surrounding the cloud.
