As small businesses change and grow, the ability to quickly scale up — or down — becomes a necessity. Adding new employees, for example, requires the company to adapt its phone system to accommodate the need for more lines.
That is harder to accomplish using traditional on-premise telephony systems due to higher setup and maintenance costs, the need for hardware on-site and reliance on IT support. A cloud-based phone system, on the other hand, would enable small businesses to manage communication services in a less costly, more streamlined and agile manner.
Benefits of a Cloud-Based Phone System
1. Fully-Integrated Communications System
Business tools that operate in the cloud are easy to deploy, enabling employees to stay connected whether they are in the office or on the go. In this way, the cloud provides a consistent business presence and helps to increase productivity with seamless access to CRM tools, email, instant messaging, voice and videoconferencing.
2. Control Over Modes of Communication
A cloud-operated system puts businesses in the driver’s seat, allowing them to pick and choose what features they need, with access to turn them on or off easily. Also, cloud solutions give employees anytime, anywhere access via a smartphone, desk phone or softphone to all their calling features.
3. Top Line Business Features
A cloud-based phone system would give small businesses access to the types of network applications that one would typically find at larger corporations. These include features such as a Virtual Assistant, Auto Attendant, Never Miss a Call or Call Center solutions.
4. Mobility and Ease of Use
Today’s workplace is increasingly mobile, and small businesses especially need to be able to operate from multiple locations. With a cloud-based system, small business employees have access to features that allow them to log in from anywhere so that they can be reached while on the go, giving customer-facing and revenue-producing employees greater control over their productivity.
5. Time Management and Efficiency
Web-based customer portals enable IT staff to manage their system more efficiently. With insight into the installation, service configuration, trouble tickets, training, billing and call analytics, this full access to a customer’s system and account allows them to spend fewer resources on project management and focus more on work that adds to the bottom line.
6. Flexibility to Scale Up (and Down)
As a business grows, so does the need to hire new employees, open new offices and onboard new customers. This requires a communications system that can scale up — or down — as the need arises. With a cloud-based phone system, businesses can add as many extensions as they need to accommodate heightened call volume, or, if necessary, simply call in to deactivate these extra extensions. Unlike traditional systems, businesses only pay for the extensions they need for as long as they need them.
7. Business Continuity
Working with a phone system “in the cloud” allows businesses to remain connected to their customers no matter the environment. A cloud-based communications system is likely to be unaffected by outside factors such as severe weather or other issues that may keep employees from getting to the office.
8. Improved Customer Service
With the Virtual Receptionist (VR) or Auto Attendant feature, businesses can easily direct calls to various departments and even create greetings unique to a given department. For example, a business could set up a holiday greeting in advance (via the administrative portal) and pre-set it to revert to the non-holiday greeting on a specified date. It could also add an on-hold message about special promotions or commonly asked questions.
9. New Service Features Added Easily
During busy seasons, some businesses will add premium calling features to increase call-taking efficiency and maximize staffing. Call Groups, for example, allow incoming calls to ring on multiple extensions. Call Queues provide a “dynamic waiting room” for callers that let businesses customize the on-hold experience and better manage call volume. Both help to decrease voicemails, missed calls and busy signals, enabling service to as many callers as possible.
10. Cost Savings
Cost savings are another benefit of cloud-based phone system. Moving telecommunications off of PBX platforms and to the cloud can be less expensive relative to monthly service rates versus that of a traditional system, helping to reduce costs and, ultimately, increase profitability.
If your company is looking to reap the benefits of moving to the cloud, then contact us for assistance.
What happens to your phones when the power goes out, the internet is down, or the old copper lines are down from a natural disaster? Are your customers going to get a busy signal? How quickly will they call the competition?
Phone System Backup Plan
With a standard phone service there would be nothing to prevent the busy signal from happening. With phone service from Farmhouse Networking all calls have the ability to be automatically forwarded and routed to virtually any person, device, or location. Plus our platform includes connectivity to multiple carriers for redundancy purposes, so no single carrier issue will impact your business.
Disasters might not be under our control, but business can continue to happen even when they occur.
If your company is concerned about losing calls or looking to add the protection a cloud phone system provides, then contact us for assistance.
If it seems like this is a typical question in your office then there is hope. The concept of internet failover has been around for years. With the advent of 4G LTE cellular networks internet failover is now within reach of the small business. If the main internet connection goes down then the 4G LTE cellular network will kick in automatically to keep your business flowing. When the main internet connection comes back online it will automatically switch back to restore full speed access.
How We Fix the Internet
Business Class Router: The Datto Networking Appliance has all the specs of true business class router including all the usual services (DHCP, DNS, VLAN, DMZ, Access Rules, etc). It also has all the features that you need to secure and expand your business with seven layer deep packet inspection, intrusion detection, traffic shaping (VoIP), client VPN, site-to-site VPN, and cloud management.
Connectivity: This router has all the connectivity you could ever need. It has 4 Gigabit LAN ports to help physically segment the network. It has the latest and most redundant wireless connectivity available. It has a fully integrated multi-band 4G LTE wireless cellular modem to keep you connected when wired internet fails.
Peace of Mind: Leave the connectivity worries to us. Our expert team will be monitoring and maintaining the Datto Networking Appliance at all times via the cloud management console and integrated alerting. We will know the internet is down before you do and will take the steps needed to get your ISP to fix things.
If your company’s internet is constantly going down, then contact us for assistance.
It never occurred to me that analog fax was still something used, but my kids’ optometrist asked me to fax in a copy of their insurance card. So I asked them if I could email it to them and they said that it would not be HIPAA compliant to do so to which I responded that I could send them an encrypted email – they were not amused. This interaction begged the question is HIPAA compliant analog fax possible. According to Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) section HHS.gov site:
Does the HIPAA Privacy Rule permit a doctor, laboratory, or other health care provider to share patient health information for treatment purposes by fax, e-mail, or over the phone?
Answer: Yes. The Privacy Rule allows covered health care providers to share protected health information for treatment purposes without patient authorization, as long as they use reasonable safeguards when doing so. These treatment communications may occur orally or in writing, by phone, fax, e-mail, or otherwise.
The Privacy Rule requires that covered health care providers apply reasonable safeguards when making these communications to protect the information from inappropriate use or disclosure. These safeguards may vary depending on the mode of communication used. For example, when faxing protected health information to a telephone number that is not regularly used, a reasonable safeguard may involve a provider first confirming the fax number with the intended recipient. Similarly, a covered entity may pre-program frequently used numbers directly into the fax machine to avoid misdirecting the information. When discussing patient health information orally with another provider in proximity of others, a doctor may be able to reasonably safeguard the information by lowering his or her voice.
So the short answer is a surprising yes they can do HIPAA compliant analog fax with a standard old facsimile machine with the numbers pre-programmed in. If they have moved on the digital fax technology then similar safeguards to email must be put in place for the storage and transmission of that data.
Recently ran into an issue where a company wanted to use multiple types of VoIP phones that required seperate settings to download their configuration with a vendor – this is usually done in a homogeneous environment via DHCP option 66 settings. (Option 66 is part of IETF RFC 2132 which states that this option uses FQDN or IP address to point to a TFTP server.) In this particular setup only one VoIP phone vendor at a time could be specified in the option 66, so custom settings were going to be needed to make all the other vendors phones work properly. Found that this could be done via DHCP reservation on either their Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard or on their Cisco 871w router, but I am sure their are ways to do it on other vendors equipment (which is outside the scope of this article). So here is how to configure the
Windows Server DHCP Option 66 Reservation
Turn the phone on its back and record the MAC address of the device.
Start the DHCP administrative tool on the server.
Expand the tree into the IPv4 then into the Scope needing the reservation.
Right Click on Reservations and choose “New Reservation…”
Give the new reservation a name, specify IP address and MAC address previously recorded.
Right click on the new reservation and choose Configure Options.
In the Reservation options scroll down to 066 Boot Server Host Name and enter the URL or IP of the vendors configuration server.
Make sure the vendor has reset the authorization token and factory reset the phone to pull the new reservation and configuration files.
Cisco 800 Series DHCP Option 66 Reservation Setup
Something to remember is that each reservation is treated as its own DHCP pool by the router. (I recommend exporting the configuration file to a local workstation and manually editting if there are more than a couple edits to make.)
Login to router and enter configuration terminal mode:
Clear the current DHCP bindings to make sure the phone will grab the correct address:
Router#clear ip dhcp binding *
Make sure the vendor has reset the authorization token and factory reset the phone to pull the new reservation and configuration files.
That is all there is to it. Enjoy a multi-vendor VoIP environment. If you need help configuring your Windows Server or Cisco IOS based router please contact us for support.
Recently wrestled with a Juniper SRX 220 router that a client needed help with securing RingCentral on. This entailed creating port forwarding rules for specific secure port ranges for TLS transport and linking those with rules for specific IP ranges belonging to RingCentral servers. Here are the specific lines of code that were used to make this connection possible (I am also throwing in the CoS settings used to shape traffic for good measure):
security policies from-zone Internet to-zone LAN policy RingCentral_IP1_NAT match source-address RingCentral_IP1
security policies from-zone Internet to-zone LAN policy RingCentral_IP1_NAT match destination-address any
security policies from-zone Internet to-zone LAN policy RingCentral_IP1_NAT match application RingCentral
security policies from-zone Internet to-zone LAN policy RingCentral_IP1_NAT then permit
security policies from-zone Internet to-zone LAN policy RingCentral_IP2_NAT match source-address RingCentral_IP2
security policies from-zone Internet to-zone LAN policy RingCentral_IP2_NAT match destination-address any
security policies from-zone Internet to-zone LAN policy RingCentral_IP2_NAT match application RingCentral
security policies from-zone Internet to-zone LAN policy RingCentral_IP2_NAT then permit
security zones security-zone Internet address-book address RingCentral_IP1 199.255.120.0/22
security zones security-zone Internet address-book address RingCentral_IP2 199.68.212.0/22
applications application RingCentral term Mobile_App_Media destination-port 4000-5000 protocol udp
applications application RingCentral term Phone_Registration_UDP destination-port 5060-6000 protocol udp
applications application RingCentral term Phone_Registration_TCP destination-port 5060-6000 protocol tcp
applications application RingCentral term RTP_SRTP_Softphone1 destination-port 8000-8200 protocol udp
applications application RingCentral term RC_Meeting_Signaling_UDP destination-port 8801-8802 protocol udp
applications application RingCentral term RC_Meeting_Signaling_TCP destination-port 8801-8802 protocol tcp
applications application RingCentral term RTP_SRTP_Deskphone destination-port 16384-16482 protocol udp
applications application RingCentral term RTP_SRTP_Softphone2 destination-port 20000-60000 protocol udp
This should be everything unless you have custom firewall filters to lock down management access or something else like that. Please feel free to contact us if you need any help configuring either your RingCentral account or Juniper routers or switches.
And God will generously provide all you need. Then you will always have everything you need and plenty left over to share with others. As the Scriptures say,
“They share freely and give generously to the poor. Their good deeds will be remembered forever.”
For God is the one who provides seed for the farmer and then bread to eat. In the same way, he will provide and increase your resources and then produce a great harvest of generosity in you. - 2 Corinthians 9:8-10
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