Practical Tips, Insights, News, & Resources For The
BroadBand Generation. Covering Network Connectivity & Design, Wireless Trends, Cloud Computing, Cybersecurity, Unified Communications, Industry 4.0, Digital Transformation, IT Infrastructure, Internet Of Things, IIoT, Smart Buildings/Cities, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence....& MUCH More.
Tuesday, July 05, 2022
How To Self-Provision Employee Workspaces With Workspace As A Service (VIDEO)
Watch this video for an example of a provider we can source for you that enables employees to work from home or anywhere utilizing a set-up process that takes literally minutes to accomplish rather than days. You'll see a cloud workspace provisioned in minutes, complete with compute, pre-licensed software, security, shared folders and more.
Our FREE support includes assistance sourcing and designing a customized cloud network solution to meet ALL your cloud computing needs.....covering public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud options. This includes comparing 100s of cloud providers with cybersecurity requirements also a major emphasis.
Simply submit a request by clicking on Cloud Services and telling us what you’re looking for. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3....and we’ll take it from there.
To take advantage of FREE assistance to engineer and design a custom SDWAN/SASE solution for your organization’s network requirements....including a comparison of Best-In-Class providers (with rate quotes)....simply click on this link and ask. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.
How To Maintain Cybersecurity For A Remote Workforce
Securing your online presence during the Covid-19 second wave is as essential as maintaining your health. Assure your business, and your employees are safe with the spammers wandering over the internet. Watch this video to get a handful of tips to manage cybersecurity in the remote workforce.
To learn more about all the options available to you for meeting your organization’s data protection and network security requirements (including security posture and risk assessments) .... plus comparisons of best-in-class network security / management providers and what they have to offer .... simply ask us at the following link (FREE). It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.
Working from home became a necessity this year, and companies across the world found themselves having to adapt to the need for remote work. Surprisingly only thirty percent of business leaders feel their organization is well prepared for remote work. Most companies saw challenges in the following three areas:
RingCentral’s goal is to make it easier for companies to pivot towards a work from home environment, and they accomplish this through their Collaborative Communications platform. They also offer the following:
240+ out-of-box integrations
5,000+ customer integrations
50,000+ developers
When talking to your company leadership about where RingCentral succeeds, there are three things you should be discussing:
Global Telephony
30% -50% usage savings
Highest quality voice
Quality AND Uptime SLAs
29 Global data centers
Local telephony and Global admin
Company-wide Collaboration
Connected Contact Center
Expert access
Shared directory
Call transfer or conference
Pulse notifications
One Vendor Relationship
One support number
No finger-pointing
Simplified pricing
Single sign-on
Simplified admin
Global number procurement
Earlier this year RingCentral also announced their direct routing solution, RingCentral Cloud PBX for. Microsoft Teams. This means that RingCentral can now integrate with MS Teams.
Whether you're a big enterprise business or a small shop, the way you interact with your customers is vital to your business success and customer loyalty. Finding the right contact center technology solution for your organizations specific needs can be an exercise in total frustration. But it doesn’t have to be. Simply tell us what you need accomplished at the link below (including WFH and cybersecurity requirements)....and we’ll help help you source and design a custom contact center solution just for you (whether that be RingCentral or another best-in-class provider). Plus.....our services are FREE.
UCaaS vs PBX ... On The Road To Digital Transformation
UCaaS or unified communications as a service is a cloud-based technology that allows organizations to converge all the ways that its users communicate into a single platform. The single platform includes voice, video, chat, text, email, and screen sharing. UCaaS most commonly replaces an organization's on-premise PBX. It includes a mobile application or softphone to communicate without a desk phone and integrate with critical business applications such as email and CRMs.
Besides network services, UCaaS is the most popular service organizations must incorporate into their digital transformation strategy. The biggest reason being that a business’s ability to communicate with its users and customers 24/7 and 365 days a year has never been more critical. Hampering their digital transformation effort is the unfortunate fact that many businesses are still hanging on to traditional on-prem PBX’s that are in dire need of replacement. This is where UCaaS comes in as the critical step toward true digital transformation across any enterprise.
Furthermore, the importance of UCaaS in business settings has been elevated in light of the impact of COVID-19 and the heightened emphasis on remote work capabilities. All of which have become a more important aspect of current and future corporate Industry4.0 strategies.
To learn more about all the options available to you for meeting your organization’s Unified Communications needs ....plus comparison of dozens of best-in-class UCaaS providers....simply ask at the following link (FREE). It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.
Smarter, More Simple SDWAN Solutions Target Cloud-Delivered Branch
"We are living through unprecedented times that require enterprises to accelerate the move to an online digital business and support the massive growth of remote workers," says Ghassan Abdo, research vice president, IDC's Worldwide Telecom. "SD-WAN is a great choice to support this new digital economy and address the need for a massively distributed and remote work environment."
As SD-WAN has become the primary WAN architecture, organizations are demanding solutions that deliver a better user experience while being simpler to deploy and manage.
Smarter, More Simple SDWAN Solutions Target Cloud-Delivered Branch
To take advantage of FREE assistance to engineer and design a SDWAN solution for your organization’s network requirements....including a comparison of Best-In-Class providers....simply click on this link and ask. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.
SDWAN Design
How To Plan & Implement A Successful Remote Work Strategy For Your Employees....A Survival Guide For Business Owners
With every significant event, our reality changes in society. Each event changes the way we work, interact, and do business with each other.
COVID-19 will be one of those events that change our status quo, and we will come out of this a very different society compared to what we were going into this. Businesses and employees will have to fight through the struggles of learning to work from home and have a fully remote workforce. Now, as almost a basic necessity for businesses to survive in our new economy, companies will be looking for guidance as UCaaS becomes the new reality.
Businesses are asking for help to make the transition from Premise Based Phone Systems, and old forms of communications, to new technology that allows people to communicate and collaborate how, when and where they want. Making this digital transformation will help them adapt to the changing environment and prepare them for other coming changes.
Today the coronavirus epidemic continues to prompt new travel restrictions and emergency declarations around the world, with massive lockdowns affecting millions of people. Work at home declarations from the CDC and other government agencies are probably going to become the new normal. Not only could it become temporary law, it's the best way to protect your employees from exposure to the novel virus. So how can you as a business owner prepare to transition your workforce into a work-at-home team that still performs at a high level?
Here at FreedomFire Communications, we are seeing certain technology buying behaviors that are the tech equivalent of loading up on bottled water, batteries, and toilet paper. For traditional businesses who still have an on-premise phone system, email server, or file servers, you're going to need to get to the Cloud if you're going to get work-at-home enabled. Here is a quick list of "ingredients" we've compiled to help step you through this transition. Not to worry, you got this!
Ingredient 1: Usable Broadband / High-Speed Internet
The first thing you need to do as a business owner is survey your employees to see what kind of broadband they are using at home. In order to run business voice and video calls they're going to need plenty of throughput. A good standard that should provide enough horsepower is 50 Mb down, 5 Mb upload speed. If your employees aren't getting those kind of speeds, you may consider offering to subsidize the difference to upgrade them from their current plan to 50 Mb x 5 Mb. There are some cable, best-effort fiber, and 4G internet providers that will allow your executives and other employees to get a business-class service delivered to their residence.
If you'd like to review your options, we have access to our patented GeoQuote tool (shown above) that will tell us, in under 30 seconds, what providers (and prices) are available at your employees' locations.
Ingredient 2: Move Your Phone System to the Cloud
You've known about UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) for some time, and now may be the time to finally make that jump. In the past, many on-premise phone system users cited quality issues related to running essential traffic over the internet as a reason to NOT move to the cloud. Those issues have more than been addressed through SD-WAN technology, which fixes packet loss and other factors that degrade voice and video quality.
Here are the key features of UCaaS that will enable your work-at-home employees by leveraging the benefits of unified communications in the cloud:
1. Video Conferencing - if your team is forced to stay at home, having a high-definition video conferencing bridge will enable you to stay connected as a team, and to stay connected to your best customers. Almost every unified communications as a service provider we offer has video conferencing built in to the monthly price, or you can buy it stand-alone from our newest provider: Zoom. Know that we have a lot of options here, including some familiar names: 8x8, RingCentral, Fuze, Nextiva, GoToMeeting (Jive/LogMeIn), and others.
2. Mobile App - when you move to UCaaS, every employee will be able to download an app to their iPhone or Android phone. Once installed, the app will become the phone system, allowing them to receive and make phone calls from their work number, to transfer calls to fellow employees, and for a general IVR to route calls to your team's soft phones by department, skills, etc. The BEST part about using a cloud-based phone system is reporting - YOU as the manager can see call volume, call duration, and dozens of other metrics about your team, all at once.
3. Collaboration - using tools like Glip (RingCentral), Slack, 8x8, Nextiva, or Microsoft Teams, your teams will be able to communicate one-to-one, one-to-many, much like a group text that never goes away. Add employees at a future date and they'll see the entire history of the chat as well as all of the files that have been uploaded to the specific groups. Caution: you're bound to see more animated gif's than you every would have dreamed possible!
4. CRM Integration - UCaaS was built to integrate with other cloud-based systems, especially CRMs. Many UCaaS providers have already built API's into the most popular CRMs: SalesForce.com, Zoho, ZenDesk, Method CRM, MS Dynamics, Sugar CRM, Hubspot, etc. If you have a homegrown CRM or other internal system you've built specifically to interact with your phone system, we have many providers that can build a custom integration with a new cloud-based phone system for you.
Ingredient 3: Move the Desktop Workspace to the Cloud
One of the reasons many companies require their workforce to come into a centralized office is the specialized software required to do their jobs. Another reason is access control, employers wants to control who has access to what file and inside a physical office, using Active Directory, you can ensure certain file sharing rules within your own Local Area Network.
We have two up-and-coming technologies that address these features and move them all to the cloud, while maintaining centralized control over access permissions.
Workspace as a Service - on of our newest suppliers, StratusWorx, offers a platform (shown in the graphic above) that allows you to run ALL of your fully-licenced software programs in the cloud, all while giving you full control over who has remote access. This would allow you to fully virtualize your office while maintaining your current level of production.
Desktop as a Service - this service (shown below) allows you to virtualize your employee's individual desktop computers, putting the actual computing in the cloud, and allowing your employees to "see" it through a light-weight app that mimics the PC's workspace.
We can source multiple vendors (shown below) that can help you move to Desktop as a Service, some of them with the capability of turning up seats in a matter of minutes, making it one of the easiest cloud technologies to implement.
Ingredient 4: Remote File Share
When you send your workers home, it's imperative that they be able to share, collaborate on, and store files in the cloud. The most popular cloud file storage providers are:
Microsoft Office 365 - OneDrive
Google G-Suite - Google Drive
Dropbox
Box.com
Using file share you'll be able to sync desired folders and files to your local machine, you'll be able to share files with JUST the people you want to see it, and most importantly, your entire enterprise will be immune from data loss caused by failing, damaged, or stolen hardware.
Time Frame: How Fast Can You Make the Pivot?
The good news is, we and our network of Trusted Service Providers can get these new services set up for you quickly. The thing that takes the longest time is the transfer of your current phone numbers, which requires paperwork to get your existing provider to release them to the new one. We typically see this taking around a month to transfer properly. Everything else can be done in weeks and in some cases, days.
Looking on the bright side, once this virus has been contained (and it will), you'll have the most advanced cloud-based technology working for you well into the foreseeable future, making your workforce dynamic, adaptable, and mobile.
If you'd like assistance in putting a work-at-home technology plan in place, simply ask us online at FreedomFire Communications and we'll take it from there. It's as easy as 1, 2, 3.
In the meantime, stay safe, work smart, and know that we are proud to play a small part in helping contain the Coronavirus outbreak and to protect our most vulnerable from this terrible virus through practical work-at-home strategies. Our thoughts and prayers go out to those affected by this outbreak.
If you have a comment, suggestion, or idea, we'd love to hear about it in the comments below!
3 Things You Need To Do Before Sending Your Employees Home To Work Remote During The Coronavirus Outbreak - A Survival Guide For Business Owners
Work at home declarations from the CDC and other government agencies are probably going to become the new normal. Not only could it become temporary law, it's the best way to protect your employees from exposure to the novel virus. So how can you as a business owner prepare to transition your workforce into a work-at-home team that still performs at a high level?
For free assistance with sourcing and design of the best work-from-home solution for your employees simply ask us at a link below, including any details on what you need to accomplish, and we’ll take it from there. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.
