SUPERCONNECTED CITIES

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Bryan Mosley
8 years ago
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1 P a g e 1 Prepared by: Steve Smith MITP MIET MIEEE Technical Director Astro Communications Ltd Date: 04/08/2014 SUPERCONNECTED CITIES Seven Things You Can Do With Your SuperConnected Cities Voucher.

2 P a g e 2 Contents Introduction... 3 Key benefits... 3 Seven things you can do with your SuperConnected Cities voucher Reduce costs using SIP trunking Improve resilience and availability using Hosted Voice over IP Telephony Reduce costs and improve resilience and availability using Cloud VoIP telephony Communicate more effectively using Cloud video conferencing Improve Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity using Cloud backup services Keep up to date with Cloud business applications Stay connected with BYOD and Cloud managed Wi-Fi... 7

Reduce costs and improve resilience and availability using Cloud VoIP telephony... 5 4. Communicate more effectively using Cloud video conferencing.

3 P a g e 3 SuperConnected Cities Introduction High speed Internet connectivity can be the enabler for your organisation. Here are just seven things you can do with your SuperConnected Cities voucher to improve business productivity, communications and resilience. These are available individually or as a powerful combination that have the potential to transform the way you do business. Before we look at those in more detail let s take a look at the key business benefits: Key benefits Do things faster increasing the speed of your connectivity will improve your productivity by giving you access to a wide range of services that can speed up your business processes and free up your time. Making use of Cloud or hosted services introduces resilience and economies of scale as well as removing IT housekeeping tasks that have the habit of creeping up on us and stealing our time. No hassle let us take the pain away from managing your telecommunications and network services. By migrating to cloud or hosted services it is someone else s responsibility to maintain and upgrade systems and deal with compliance and system security. Increase profitability by lowering costs through economies of scale and reduced administration, combined with an increase in productivity resulting from higher system availability and performance, and being able to work from anywhere with Internet access. SuperConnected Cities (0) teamastro@astro.co.uk

These are available individually or as a powerful combination that have the potential to transform the way you do business.

4 P a g e 4 Seven things you can do with your SuperConnected Cities voucher 1. Reduce costs using SIP trunking If you have a self-hosted office telephone system a SIP trunk provides access to Internet telephony and a gateway into the public telephone network. When SIP is configured correctly it can deliver excellent cost reductions while providing inherent Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity for your business telephony. By installing a SIP trunk you can move your main telephone numbers so they are delivered via the Internet Telephony Service Provider (ITSP). In the event of a disaster preventing access to your place of work, incoming calls to your business can be re-routed to an alternative location or locations of your choice. High speed connectivity is the enabler for SIP. A high speed Internet connection carries the SIP trunk and then routes it via the Internet Service Provider (ISP) to the ITSP as well as providing you with high speed Internet access.

When SIP is configured correctly it can deliver excellent cost reductions while providing inherent Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity for your business telephony.

5 P a g e 5 2. Improve resilience and availability using Hosted Voice over IP Telephony With high speed connectivity you can host your own telephone system within the Internet Service Provider s data centre making full use of the resilience and removing the need to allocate space and power within your own premises. The high speed Internet connection carries your telephone extensions via Voice over IP from your premises to your telephone system in the data centre. You can even have office handsets at home or softphone clients on your laptop, providing an excellent call overflow or disaster recovery facility. With a softphone client you can work from anywhere with Internet access. External services such as dedicated telephone lines or SIP trunks can be delivered to the telephone switch within the data centre. 3. Reduce costs and improve resilience and availability using Cloud VoIP telephony High speed connectivity gives you the option of taking advantage of Cloud VoIP telephony services. Rather than buy your own telephone system and host it on your own premises or within an Internet Service Provider s data centre, you simply rent a number of extensions referred to as seats from a Cloud provider. You no longer have to worry about upgrades or system maintenance as this is all taken care of by the service provider. You can also deploy office handsets at home or softphone clients on your laptop, providing an excellent call overflow or disaster recovery facility. With a softphone client you can work from anywhere with Internet access. External services such as dedicated telephone lines or SIP trunks can be delivered by the Cloud VoIP service provider or you can source your own and have them delivered to your chosen Cloud VoIP service provider.

full use of the resilience and removing the need to allocate space and power within your own premises.

6 P a g e 6 4. Communicate more effectively using Cloud video conferencing High speed connectivity provides you access to cost effective Cloud video conferencing services. Cloud video conferencing services have revolutionised video conferencing removing the need for expensive video infrastructure. System are very easy to install, manage and use and you can be up and running in minutes using software clients and in less than an hour with a room system. System upgrades and maintenance are all taken care of by the service provider as well as feature enhancements. Cloud video conferencing comprises end points and virtual meeting rooms. End points can communicate direct with each other on point to point calls but multi-way conferencing involving three or more end points requires a virtual meeting where conferences can be scheduled or set up ad hoc mid call. 5. Improve Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity using Cloud backup services All of your PCs and Servers can be backed up to the Cloud via your high speed Internet connection. In the event of a disaster causing you loss of data on your local machines you can restore your data quickly and easily. We often think about disasters as being large scale affairs but they come in many guises. A cup of coffee spilt over a laptop can be real disaster if your data is inaccessible and you have no back recent back up to restore from. USB drives are reasonably reliable but when they fail it is usually catastrophic. You may be able to find a data recovery service to retrieve all or most of the data from the drive but they are usually expensive and the process can take days. Using Cloud backup as part of your Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity policy will give you the reassurance that you have these eventualities covered.

System are very easy to install, manage and use and you can be up and running in minutes using software clients and in less than an hour with a room system.

7 P a g e 7 6. Keep up to date with Cloud business applications High speed Internet connectivity will enable you to take advantage of Cloud business applications such as file and print services, document sharing and CRM. You no longer have to worry about license management, compliance or keeping your software up to date as this is all part of the Cloud package. You will also be able to work from anywhere with Internet access which is a great boost for productivity and an inherent disaster recovery facility. Many business applications are available in the Cloud but if you have any specific or bespoke applications they can be hosted in a resilient data centre in a virtual environment to provide you with a secure and reliable environment for your critical business applications. 7. Stay connected with BYOD and Cloud managed Wi-Fi The demand for wireless networking is increasing rapidly. The majority of people carry more than one mobile device whether that is a smart phone, tablet, ebook reader, laptop or other work or leisure device. In addition to this, machine to machine communications are now also placing demands on our wireless networks. As demands increase effective management becomes a critical factor in successful Wi-Fi operation. High speed Internet connectivity will provide your Wi-Fi users with fast Internet access, and with Cloud management you will effective control, monitoring, maintenance, performance and security from anywhere with Internet access as well as automatic upgrades and managed compliance. When you combine Cloud managed wireless with Mobile Application Management and Mobile Device Management you have a very powerful and secure environment for your mobile estate. If you prefer a hands off approach, we provide a fully managed wireless service.

and CRM. You no longer have to worry about license management, compliance or keeping your software up to date as this is all part of the Cloud package.

Meeting the challenge of voice services

Meeting the challenge of voice services Executive Summary Making the most of convergence to bridge the gap between IT networks and traditional telephony. This white paper is aimed at IT support companies