Internet-based phone service (Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP) offers a range of flexibility and features that aren’t available with conventional telephone service. However, you must be willing to deal with a few tradeoffs to get those added features. If you’re thinking about moving your business over to VoIP, let’s consider a few of these advantages and disadvantages.
If you’re thinking about switching your business telephone service to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP, or phone service over the Internet), you might be wondering about the startup requirements. Will you need special hardware? What equipment will you need to make the switch?
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to setting up VoIP service. The primary need for any VoiP service is a high-speed Internet connection, which most companies already have in place. Typically, smaller businesses need only a minimal amount of additional equipment, especially for cloud-based VoIP where the servers are located offsite. If your business requires a larger premises-based service (PBX), you may need more hardware, more servers and additional infrastructure. Let’s look at a few of the more common scenarios.
We’ve covered a lot of ground over the past several months, discussing many IT and telecom solutions available for smaller companies like yours. Along the way, you’ve probably immediately understood the value of certain solutions—others, not so much. The reason? Not every business needs every solution we’ve introduced. Thus, we thought it would be fitting to wrap up this series by offering some guidelines as to which solutions might work best for you, based on the size and type of business you run.
Hopefully by now, you’ve begun to recognize as a small business owner that modern technology enables you to compete with larger companies in ways that weren’t possible even a few years ago. Over the past several months, we’ve explored an expansive number of IT and telecom solutions available to you, how they work, how they can help your business, and so on. Before wrapping up, let’s quickly review some of these solutions.
Given the complexities involved in moving IT, proper planning and organization can help streamline your office technology relocation; it can keep it from devolving into chaos and unnecessary downtime. Let’s look at a few practical tips to help the process.
If your business grows the way it should, you may encounter some “good problems to have,” including the need to expand into larger facilities. When that day comes, your IT systems must move (and probably expand) with you. How do office technology relocation services work, and what should you expect?
Brilliant as the idea might seem, Hardware-as-a-Service is a relatively new concept in the IT community. We’re just now beginning to see more and more companies offer HaaS solutions a way to attract small business customers, as well as keeping their brands competitive. Let’s look at a few examples.
If you’ve been to New York City recently, you’ve probably seen one or more racks of blue bicycles bearing the name Citi Bike. For a small daily or annual fee, you can grab a bicycle from one of many stations throughout the city, ride it around, and drop it off at any other Citi Bike station. (Many other major cities have versions of bike sharing systems, from Paris to Denver.)
As demand increases for more advanced IT solutions for smaller business with limited budgets, developers began looking for ways to optimize resources—to help computer systems and networks operate more efficiently, upgrade more easily and so forth. The answers to these demands have been network storage and network virtualization; both of these empower smaller companies to compete with larger ones, without having to buy a cumbersome amount of hardware and infrastructure or hire a permanent IT staff to manage it.
If you have more than one person working on more than one computer in your company—or if you access company files by more than one device—your computers and devices need to be connected by a network. Think of your network as the software/hardware infrastructure by which your computers access and share company data, as opposed to having some files on one computer and other files on another. Network storage and virtualization are two key elements of your network that help you manage and process large amounts of information in a cost-effective manner.
