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Unified communications solutions rapidly replacing legacy phone systems

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Unified communications solutions are displacing legacy technologies with such speed that some industry observers have begun thinking about the end of the phone number. Facebook’s landmark $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp – an ad-free mobile messaging service that relies on the user’s screen name rather than a phone number – underscored the rapid ascent of alternatives to the aging SMS/circuit-switched telephony infrastructure.

Chat apps overtake SMS, showing changing face of consumer and business communications
Last year, E.U. Commission vice president Neelie Kroes announced that OTT chat apps had overtaken SMS for worldwide messaging volume. While SMS likely isn’t going away just yet, much of the value in communications has certainly moved from basic services to richer platforms that make the most of high-speed data connections and provide amenities beyond text messaging and voice calling.

Consumer options such as Skype and LINE have become famous for video conferencing and stickers, respectively. Similarly, business-grade offerings often distinguish themselves by including data sharing and email services in addition to text and voice. Organizations across many verticals, including healthcare and education, have put UC to work as they modernize their IT operations. A managed services provider can help navigate the common obstacles that companies face as they move to

“Many of the benefits of unified communications center on internal productivity improvements, or the facilitation of collaborative working,” Liam Ward-Proud wrote for City A.M. “But [small and midsize businesses]  also face the challenge of managing numerous client contact points, and a total communications strategy can help ensure a consistent client experience is delivered.”

University of Washington remakes IT department with UC
Universities have been at the forefront of UC adoption as they adjust to the rapidly evolving communications habits of students. Take the University of Washington, which began planning its move from a legacy phone system to UC as far back as 2010, according to EdTech.

The institution began by overhauling its infrastructure, installing fresh switches to support a network that could handle converged voice and data. Since its systems served more than 22,000 users, upgrades were made in phases over the course of a few years, with medical call centers and campus public safety among the first to receive access to the new platforms.

The university’s UC systems grew to encompass voice, voicemail, chat and video conferencing. Down the road, it has its eye on video-as-a-service and additional cloud-based functionality. Indeed one of the underlying value propositions of UC is that it creates a clear pathway toward cloud computing. Many UC components can be hosted and managed by a third-party, freeing users from having to tend to their own infrastructure. Functionality can also be changed and scaled depending on demand.

In the University of Washington’s case, the rollout of UC is facilitating creation of hybrid cloud. Hybrid setups typically involve:

  • Some infrastructure that is managed in-house, often for reasons such as security, compliance, control and performance.
  • Other applications and resources – for computing, networking and storage – that are piped in from an external provider.
  • APIs and mechanisms for determining what gets run where and when. For example, a workload that is running internally but requires more capacity can be shifted to public cloud infrastructure.

For the university, some assets will be kept on-premises while software is increasingly shifted to the cloud for greater availability.

“Right now, people can use the features in Microsoft Lync, such as chat, voice, video and conference sharing, on a peer-to-peer basis,” Roland Rivera, director network strategy and telecommunications for the university, told EdTech. “Our goal is to provide these capabilities campus-wide. As the technology evolves, we plan to keep the [session initiation protocol] core in-house, but migrate applications to software-as-a-service cloud solutions as those become available.”

Getting better device and data security through desktop virtualization

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Desktop virtualization is an increasingly popular way to get more out of old IT systems while enabling access to company applications from virtually any device. By hosting an operating system on a centralized virtual machine, organizations can avoid the hassle of installing and managing extra software on every last piece of equipment. Under ideal circumstances, virtualization contributes to high levels of security and convenience.

Virtual desktop infrastructure and mobile security
The influx of mobile endpoints into the workplace, fueled by bring-your-own-device policies, has made such virtual desktop infrastructure appealing. IDC recently estimated that 155 million smartphones would be used for BYOD in the Asia-Pacific region in 2014.

But what about security? Employees who use their own hardware may be prone to mingling personal habits and data with corporate assets. A classic example is managing sensitive work documents through consumer applications such as Dropbox.

Enter VDI. Important data can be kept in cloud storage services and accessed exclusively via secure connections. Information is usually not retained locally, and all permissions are protected by authentication mechanisms. VDI basically provides a catch-all solution to managing application access in the context of BYOD.

"The move to BYOD was a wakeup call for mobile security because information security is a key IT responsibility – regardless of whether the mobile device in question is company-provided or user-owned," observed Michael Finneran for TechTarget. "Unless an organization opts for a solution that avoids storing corporate data on a mobile device, systems will be needed to protect that information."

Virtualization vendors target health care, financial industries
VDI's potential for securing applications and data has caught the attention of organizations in health care, finance and other regulated sectors. At the same time, major technology vendors have worked on thin client solutions for these markets, crafting products and services that enable desktop virtualization through minimal infrastructure.

Still, as virtualization becomes more popular, there have been concerns about balancing performance and security. Network Computing's Jim O'Reilly dug into the dilemma by noting that many providers have added instance storage, which are usually solid-state drives that provide the speed and muscle to overcome common bottlenecks such as VDI boot storms (i.e., when everyone logs in at around the same time).

Instance storage enables outstanding performance, but it also results in data states being preserved and, in theory, prone to surveillance and theft. Persistent data could be an issue for health care organizations obligated to comply with legislation such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Organizations should understand the ins and out of any virtualization solution before entrusting data to it.

Healthcare providers turn to network security, desktop virtualization to protect data

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There's plenty of work to do in shoring up network security at healthcare organizations. While the retail sector has been been making headlines for months due to oversights that led to record-setting breaches at Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels, hospitals and clinics may be even more vulnerable to attack than these chains, even if they haven't been the subjects of similarly high-profile incidents yet.

Healthcare lags retail, finance in network security
A recent report from BitSight Technologies rated the security postures of different verticals on a scale from 250 to 900 (a higher figure means stronger protection). Healthcare received a 660, falling well behind retail at 685, with utilities and finance even farther up the ladder.

"Unlike the financial institutions and electric utilities in the S&P 500, the healthcare and pharmaceutical companies do not view cybersecurity as a strategic business issue," stated the authors of the BitSight report, according to Cruxial CIO. "They do not spend enough resources to protect their data, in part because cybersecurity has not received the executive level attention it deserves."

The results are surprising in light of how many regulations, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, govern healthcare data. Security firm Redspin estimated that nearly 30 million records have been compromised in HIPAA breaches since 2009, and that the yearly total rose 138 percent between 2012 and 2014.

Mitigating risk with managed network security and virtualization
To avoid becoming victims, organizations can rely on a managed services provider to install and oversee mechanisms that shield important assets from surveillance and theft. Core capabilities may include:

  • Dedicated private IP networks that carry encrypted data
  • Secure remote access and collaboration
  • Network authentication and integrity checking
  • Firewalls for MPLS IP-VPN
  • Around-the-clock security management

These fully-featured solutions have become increasingly appealing to healthcare providers, especially as initiatives such as bring your own device and technologies like cloud computing have revolutionized IT. Administrators may no longer feel confident in their networks' safety in the face of threats that could enter from any one of many possible attacks surfaces, including smartphones or unauthorized cloud apps.

Health IT Security's Patrick Oullette chronicled how one healthcare security executive had recalibrated his organization's approach to network security in order to deal with today's threats and usage habits. In practice, this shift has entailed moving beyond data loss prevention and incorporating exfiltration techniques to keep tabs on device activity and traffic flows across the entire network.

"We also have a robust data exfiltration capability that we've instituted at the core of the network and the perimeter so we can watch data flows," David Reis, vice president at Lahey Health, told Health IT Security. "Looked at that way, it becomes illuminating pretty quickly and easy to flesh things out. You ask where the data is moving in and out from, what devices are plugging in and out and what users are doing once they're plugged in."

The adoption of advanced network security measures is promising, especially in light of the healthcare sector having accounted for 43 percent of all breaches in 2013, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. On this same front, healthcare providers are implementing technologies such as desktop virtualization to bolster security.

Virtual desktops are appealing to hospitals and clinics because they involve little more than dumb terminals, to which operating systems are supplied from remote server. Accordingly, there's less risk of misconfiguration or data theft than with a machine that was running a locally installed OS. Speaking to Health IT Security, Chris Logan, chief information security officer at Care New England Health, described desktop virtualization as "a huge win for security."

Colocation increasingly popular among banks and other enterprises

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Many companies are deciding to forgo building and maintaining their own data centers in favor of colocation options offered by third-party providers. There are numerous advantages to this approach, especially now that organizations are crafting their own applications, many of them mission-critical, designed to scale for many users.

What can be accomplished through colocation? Key benefits include:

  • Physical and data security: Colocation providers typically manage highly secure facilities that feature closed-circuit cameras, biometric scanners and alarm systems. Furthermore, actual server cabinets may be locked and full-time security staff may be on site. With an in-house data center, the costs of such measures would be exorbitant, but they are included in many colocation plans.
  • Scalability: Keeping up with evolving requirements and user demand can be tricky with an in-house data center. When a change is needed, extra equipment may need to purchased and additional staff hired. With colocation, upgrading is a much simpler matter of simply changing the service plan.
  • Redundancy and reliability: Colocation facilities are often decked out with environmental monitoring to ensure that conditions are optimal, plus they usually feature redundant power supplies. Similarly, top-flight equipment enables high network reliability. Clients can worry less about the fallout from natural disasters, power outages or downtime that would more acutely affect a self-run data center than a colo site.
  • Performance: Building on the last point, colocation data centers have strong, consistent performance as a result of redundancies, as well as optimal power and networking arrangements.
  • Support: Colocation packages feature around-the-clock client support. Rather than having to troubleshoot an issue in the middle of the night on their own, IT personnel can contact a representative for technical assistance.

Taken together, these perks facilitate economical and reliable utilization of data centers. Colocation helps enterprises keep pace with the emergence of cloud computing and new requirements for application development and data processing, all while controlling costs. Unsurprisingly, colocation providers have been ramping up their budgets to serve the growing number of organizations interested in their services.

Colocation spending surges as enterprises spend less on in-house data centers
Rising interest in colocation has forced providers to expand capacity and services. An Uptime Institute study found that almost 90 percent of surveyed colocation companies had increased their budgets year-over-year.

Similar growth hasn’t occurred within enterprises, with only half of them (excepting financial institutions) reporting larger budgets than the year before. However, more than 60 percent of banks and other financial services providers saw gains.

Across the board, though, more resources are being moved off premises and into colocation data centers or cloud computing environments. The study found that:

  • One quarter of respondents’ capacity was running in colocation facilities, while seven percent was tied to public cloud.
  • Almost 40 percent of companies using at least 5,000 servers – most of them in finance – relied on more than five providers.
  • Availability, geographic scalability and capital cost reduction were primary drivers of colocation adoption.

These findings give a good cross-section of where enterprises are at as they try to deal with the expanding roles of software and cloud computing. Colocation gives institutions in verticals such as finance a leg up in controlling costs and improving reliability.

How data center backup helps with business continuity

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Backing up data should be standard operating procedure for everyone by now. It’s not worth the risk of losing important documents, photos and videos, especially now that there are so many options for stashing these assets in redundant cloud storage services or on an external hard drive.

But while consumers may have only a few gigabytes of data to back up, organizations have a much more extensive undertaking when it comes to ensuring the safety of mission-critical information. With the ongoing shift to data centers, colocation and cloud computing, companies have to be conscious of how and where their massive data stores are kept.

Back up data center assets to guard against loss
Data center backup plans are increasingly important hedges against disaster. A Unisonius Consulting study of Turkish data centers noted that many sites are still vulnerable to threats such as:

  • Flooding: Some data centers are located in low-elevation locales or in cellars.
  • Power outage: Having only a single electricity supplier means that a facility cannot easily accommodate redundancy.
  • Earthquakes: Depending on their locations, data centers may be subject to seismic activity.

While the report examined data centers in Turkey, similar conditions exist around the world, endangering data that is properly housed or protected by backup. Frequent outages underscore what could happen to data and business continuity in a worst-case scenario.

“There is always a data center outage in the U.S. It’s whether you have invested in backup services or not that will determine whether your services are affected,” Jordan Lowe, CEO at ServerCentral told DatacenterDynamics. “As a business you make an active decision whether to invest into backup sites. It is a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money but, if you don’t want a service affected that’s a bullet you have to bite.”

Features to look for in data center backup
For organizations in sectors such as finance, it is worth having peace of mind when it comes to data backup and restoration. Here are some specific features that make for a good backup solution:

  • Secure, automatic multi-site backup: Having just one backup isn’t enough. It is better to use a service that automatically and securely (using encryption) relays backup data from one site to another.
  • Disaster recovery: It may be beneficial to migrate assets to a secure off-site location to mitigate risk from flooding, hurricanes and fires.
  • Easy administration: A Web-based, graphical interface protected by a virtual private network is valuable for managing backup policies and workflows from anywhere.

These capabilities contribute to the ongoing safety and integrity of data. Even in the event of a natural disaster or outage, key assets are preserved and business continuity is sustained.

BYOD could evolve into bring your own everything

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Bring your own device has certainly had its fans in recent years, with a growing number of organizations drawn to the collaborative and productive capabilities of smartphones and tablets. Gartner has estimated that by 2017 half of firms will not only allow but encourage employees to take advantage of company BYOD policies.

BYOD and the path toward bringing in anything and everything
Although BYOD is commonly associated with someone simply bringing in a personal device and connecting it to various company applications (as well as attendant security mechanisms), it has the potential to become, or at least influence, something much bigger. Some firms believe that the same ethos behind BYOD could lead to employee-supplied software, storage and services – basically a bring your own anything/everything state of affairs.

According to the Australian government document "Victorian Government ICT Strategy 2014 to 2015," chronicled the shift to BYOD by public sector agencies, citing core benefits such as:

  • Efficient working arrangements: Employees can work from anywhere, potentially driving down organizational costs for office space and power
  • Higher productivity: Workers may feel more comfortable operating out of their homes and using their own devices
  • Easier hardware management: Organizations don't have to buy new endpoints as often, if at all.

The implications of BYOD adoption are wide-reaching. With enterprises becoming increasingly less reliant on hardware, software and even facilities that they have paid for upfront, there's the allure of supporting more operations through cloud computing services that can be delivered to any device, anywhere. It's possible that workers could supplement their personal smartphones and tablets with productivity tools and online storage of their choosing.

"Underpinning BYOD, a range of policies and standards are required to ensure that security, interoperability and performance are not compromised. BYOD is a first step in a broader approach to employee [information and communications technology] productivity, leading to bringing your own productivity software and some storage – i.e. BYOE ('bring your own everything')," wrote the report authors.

The range of use cases for BYOD is certainly impressive. Eight years ago, Seton Academy in South Holland, Indiana introduced student laptops, containing 70 percent of the required textbooks, and now it is transitioning to BYOD. More specifically, its educators plan to use cutting-edge hardware to support school-wide initiatives such as delivering books through the cloud and moving to electronic-only submission of papers.

Unified communications brings real benefits to education

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As its name suggests, a unified communications suite gives the user a variety of business services, from instant messaging and email to voice calling and video conferencing, in a single convenient platform. On top of that, UC can serve as a natural path into cloud computing. Many of its key functionalities do not even require on-premises physical equipment since they can be run from remotely hosted servers.

UC solutions are ideal for organizations looking to consolidate their communications processes and save money while doing so. Let's look at some of the general benefits of UC, as well as how it has worked in practice for institutions in higher education.

Why organizations should consider replacing legacy systems with UC
The well known limitations of legacy hardware and software – inflexibility, difficult maintenance and total cost – can hold back businesses that are in the midst of rapid growth. Rather than deal with arduous upgrades of traditional phone systems, for instance, companies can adopt a UC platform that provides a broader set of communications services with a lower price tag.

Some of the most notable perks of UC include:

  • Better overall user experience: Thanks to the rise of mobile computing, individuals now expect immersive, intuitive interactions with all devices and applications. UC offerings may feature rich interfaces, plus they're usually compatible with smartphones and tablets, making it possible to work from anywhere.
  • Reduced equipment- and support-related costs: Investing in a UC system may not even require purchasing new hardware upfront. Services are delivered through an IP network, an appealing arrangement for cost-conscious small and midsize businesses. The UC provider may also handle support issues, freeing up the IT department to attend to other matters.
  • Flexibility and scalability: Backed by cloud storage services, UC solutions can be easily modified and extended as business requirements evolve and the user base grows.

University puts UC to work in modernizing practices
How does UC look in the real world? EdTech chronicled the Florida State University College of Medicine's adoption of a UC suite that included video conferencing and was supported by server virtualization.

Five years ago, the institution upgraded its network to support the added bandwidth requirements of video conferencing, and more recently it virtualized its servers to save rack space. The result has been a UC video conferencing platform that enables remote work and easy video viewing by students and guests.

"We now have more than 2,000 recordings that take up in excess of 2 terabytes of data," college media specialist Patrick Sparkman told EdTech. "While virtualizing our UC servers was part of the college's effort to modernize its server infrastructure, adding the [storage area network] gave us the storage capabilities we needed. And, through the server virtualization, we now have the redundancy we didn't have when we started."

The college is still moving toward full implementation of UC. Over the next few years, it hopes to continue making use of platforms such as Microsoft Lync and also integrate voicemail with email.

Clear policies and user education enable effective BYOD

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Bring your own device has been all the rage in recent years, ever since iOS and Android smartphones and tablets entered the mainstream. Although modestly powered compared to a modern desktop PC, these devices have many built-in advantages over older hardware, including high-resolution, pixel-dense displays, 3G and 4G LTE cellular connectivity, and excellent portability.

Still, there are some key considerations to make when adopting a BYOD strategy. Are devices properly secured? How much will it take to support each new endpoint? There are plenty of options out there for organizations seeking to make the most of BYOD and overcome common obstacles related to security and cost.

BYOD has solid momentum, raising the stakes for user education and sound implementation
One of the biggest benefits of BYOD is that it potentially frees the organization from having to shoulder the costs of additional hardware upgrades, since each user supplies his or her own device. On top of that, the freedom and flexibility conferred by BYOD can translate into new business opportunities, such as ones for sales teams that need to make presentations or access corporate data while on the road.

“BYOD strategies are the most radical change to the economics and the culture of client computing in business in decades,” stated Gartner analyst David Willis. “The benefits of BYOD include creating new mobile workforce opportunities, increasing employee satisfaction, and reducing or avoiding costs.”

Gartner predicts that by 2017, half of all businesses will require employees to adopt  BYOD, in hopes of achieving these benefits and others. Setting up and enforcing BYOD policies could save companies a lot of money that would have otherwise gone toward building dedicated networks and procuring compatible hardware.

Solutions such as desktop virtualization have come to the fore alongside BYOD, making it increasingly possible to provide a consistent operating system experience to every device within the organization. Vendors such as Samsung have also created device-specific security suites designed to ease BYOD management.

Ensuring security and productivity with a BYOD strategy
It is important to have an actionable plan in place before implementing BYOD. As ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes pointed out, a seat-of-the-pants approach usually does not work since companies can run into trouble trying to ensure that, for instance, assets are not moved from the internal network to public-facing cloud storage services.

Instead, companies have to train employees on using BYOD-enabled hardware responsibly and regularly reinforce guidelines. More specifically, some considerations for a sensible BYOD policy might include:

  • Guidance on how to deal with lost devices
  • What happens if a BYOD user leaves the organization
  • Listing of what company data, if any, is governed by regulations

Ultimately, BYOD is an exciting opportunity for organizations, but one that must be approached with care. Common sense and technical know-how can transform employee devices into valuable company assets.

“We are now entering a period of transformation,” Samsung Telecommunications America vice president David Lowe told FierceMobileIT. “It started out with clients being very reluctant to support mobility in their enterprise, trying to figure a way to keep it out. We are now in the transformation stage where enterprises are finally embracing it. That’s where the real innovation is going to come.”

Developing a strategic view is essential in the cloud storage era

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The business world is moving toward what may soon be an all-cloud computing deployment model, a recent IT World Canada article noted. But as companies are increasingly prompted to shift their resources to colocation hosting and cloud storage solutions, they also must make sure to do so with a strategic vision. Although the cloud can offer valuable solutions to existing problems, IT departments will still want to rely on a range of specific technologies based on application needs.

"[P]ublic procurement processes will almost inevitably lead to more than one type of cloud being used which, for many reasons, is probably preferable but also more complex," IT World Canada contributor Don Sheppard wrote.

Getting into the cloud is often seen as such a key imperative for businesses that there is less consideration about the best way to do so, ITBusinessEdge contributor Arthur Cole explained. A lack of planning can hold back a cloud implementation from offering maximum benefit. In many cases, companies have multiple departments attempting separate moves to the cloud, which can limit the technology's inherent agility and integration benefits.

For some organizations, the public cloud may not be the ideal solution, and a custom virtualization deployment may make more sense, the article noted. To determine the best form of cloud storage for an individual business, it can be advantageous to work with a managed services provider to develop a custom plan. More often than not, a hybrid cloud offering that gives organizations the security and control advantages of on-premises solutions and the scalability and flexibility of the cloud will be the ideal route to take.

Unified communications expands into new deployment models

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It's long been clear that the era of the phone exchange as it's traditionally worked has come to an end, but the era of its initial replacement, the traditional on-premises unified communications, is dissolving as well – not that the market is in decline. Instead, companies are migrating toward hosted unified communications solutions that leverage a diverse cloud environment.

A recent Infonetics Research study found that the market for VoIP services grew 8 percent from 2012 to 2013, and sales of hosted PBX and unified communications systems increased 13 percent. These trends suggest that business VoIP has moved into the mainstream, according to Infonetics principal analyst Diane Myers.

"Hosted unified communications are seeing strong interest up-market as midmarket and larger enterprises evaluate and move more applications to the cloud, and this is positively impacting the market," she said.

Not only are more companies considering hosted UC options, many are embracing the modern reality of UC, which is more fragmented than in the past, a recent No Jitter article reporting from the UC Summit said. While cloud hosting solutions are perfect for some business needs, many companies prefer to keep other tasks on-premises. Given these challenges, businesses can benefit from working with a managed services firm to develop a clear UC strategy that blends internal data center and external cloud resources.