Tag Archives: IT

Should You Use Cloud-Based Phone Systems?

March 23, 2017 Callum Huddlestone

The traditional, on-premise phone systems are being replaced by equipment-free, cloud based phone systems. The reasons are simple. Traditional phone systems come with many limitations. They are expensive, difficult to scale up or down, and can’t be reconfigured easily. As a result, a large number of businesses have started using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) systems instead. Not only VoIP systems are easy to install and maintain, but can also be integrated with existing business services easily.

Since cloud services are becoming more and more popular — as businesses have started moving their existing services to cloud servers — it is natural to wonder whether you should consider moving to VoIP system. Cloud services are in demand for a reason — they allow you to focus on the critical aspects of your business, and leave technicalities to an expert, who specializes in the field. Apart from reduced upfront expenses, and equipment maintenance costs, using cloud based VoIP services can offer many benefits. These are:

Full Control Over Communication

A cloud-based phone system is easily customizable, and allows you to switch the features on or off on the go. Scaling both up and down is always a breeze. New users can be added or removed on the fly. Cloud service also makes it possible for the employees to access it from anywhere they might be, using their smartphone, laptop, or even a desk phone.

Premium Business Features

One of the major advantages of using cloud-based VoIP service is that even small businesses can enjoy top line business features that are usually available only for large corporations, at affordable rates. Examples include call centre solutions, virtual assistant, queues, conference calls, auto attendant, etc.

Maximum Uptime

Cloud service providers take all kinds of measures to ensure that their systems are prepared for data breaches and disasters. They also monitor the systems 24/7. As long as you have a stable network with good dedicated VoIP bandwidth in the system, it is rare for the service to go down. For the most part, you get to enjoy seamless phone communication with your clients.

Conclusion

In today’s digital world, where both business and social interaction is done via emails, instant messages, website and blog content, the significance of phones has not diminished. Important matters are still discussed on the phone. Thus, if the phone service is down for even an hour, it can cost a tremendous loss, not only in terms of money, but also in terms of the potential customers who couldn’t connect. On-premise, traditional system is as good as the network infrastructure constructs. However, IT admins have the the ability to control all of its variables. Because of this, they might be reluctant to switch to the VoIP system. Keep in mind that VoIP is affordable, easy to scale, and gives a peace of mind that your phone communication is secure and is supported by experts in the field.

Using “SMART” Goals to Evaluate your Website – Part I

March 22, 2017 Kris Price

So, you have set up a beautiful website that has powerful and informative content for your prospects and other relevant visitors. You have added contact forms, explained your services clearly, and added important links. This should do just fine, right? Unfortunately, the answer is “no”.

Your marketing efforts must not stop at merely creating and hosting a quality website. The Internet is a big platform where a number of IT companies are vying for the same spot that you are after. Thus, traffic gets distributed unevenly, and if you want more of that to reach your website, then you must establish concrete IT marketing goals, and measure them for evaluation.

An ideal website for an IT business must have SMART goals, which are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.

Creating the SMART goals

With SMART goals you can cover all the major aspects of your marketing campaign, and make sure you are on the right track.

Specific

Goals that are vague have no value. Thus, if your marketing team needs to focus on creating a “good” website, and drive “excellent” results, then you must revise the entire strategy altogether. “Good” results don’t mean anything. Even if you want “good results”, you must be able to put it into numbers that define how “good” it is. Will you consider a 1,000 unique visitors per day good? Or do you need higher numbers to qualify as “good”.

Measurable

Borrowing the previous example, you must be able to measure your goals. This allows you to track your progress, and take actions accordingly. So, if it was your goal to convert at least 10 leads per week through your website forms, and if you are getting 5-6 leads conversions, you can make adjustments in your marketing campaign for improvement.

Attainable

It goes without saying that the marketing goals that you have set must be realistic and attainable. Goals that are not practical will not only waste time and resources, but also hurt the morale of the marketing team.

Relevant

A lot of thought and planning must go into creating the goals so that the team’s efforts are not in vain. For example, while a huge amount of brochure downloads might be good for business, but if the majority of these downloads are through bots, then you might need to revise the assets you have uploaded for downloads.

Timely

Each goal must have a fixed timeline. It doesn’t matter if a goal is to be attained within a month, a year, or more, a deadline is a must. This helps in keeping your team focused, and also increases the overall productivity.

To be continued in Part II.

Marketing Mistakes That Every MSP Must Avoid

January 21, 2017 backuptech

As more and more businesses are embracing cloud technologies, the need for dependable Managed Service Providers (MSPs) is increasing. And while most service providers are doing a great job at marketing, some of them are lagging behind. In order to become a well-established MSP, it is imperative that you focus on your marketing strengths, but at the same time, avoid mistakes that could potentially bringing you down.

Here are some of the main marketing mistakes MSPs must avoid at all costs:

Using a Poor Website Design

A business website serves as the company’s storefront. Just like a business owner ensures that their brick and mortar store not only looks appealing, but also allows their customers to do business easily, you must build your website, keeping these things in mind. It is surprising how so many MSPs’ websites are so bland. Many providers don’t even bother displaying an image of an actual person, when the MSP business has a lot to do with building relationships alone.

Apart from ensuring that your website looks simple and appealing you must take some additional steps to improve the conversion rate. Important links of whitepapers, brochures, and forms, etc. should be easily available for the visitors. You can also add a live-chat feature if possible. Many are not quite comfortable calling businesses on phone, or writing emails. A chat feature is simple and provides quick answers the visitors may have.

Telling, Not Showing

Don’t tell your leads how your state of the art technology is based on such-and-such proprietary algorithms, or that your systems are backed by some of the best security mechanisms. For instance, if you are an MSP who provides cloud backup services, show them how your cloud backup facility can protect their business if data breaches occur, or how they can save more than 50% or more of their existing IT costs by using your services. Customers are rarely swayed by tech jargon or an MSPs personal accomplishments. Instead, show them how your service can actually benefit them through facts and numbers, and you have piqued their interest.

Using an Inefficient Lead Generation System

A business depends on its customers. However, you always have to start with a prospect, which is converted into a customer over time. To improve this conversion rate, it is important that you have an excellent lead generation system in place. It should cover everything, starting from lead identification, to lead nurturing, and then finally lead conversion. Here a few points to keep in mind:

Creating a profile for quality leads: How do you identify the quality leads? Not every person who shows interest in your service is likely to close a deal. Thus, you must maintain a standard profile that you can compare your leads against. If they meet the profile, you can add them to your database of high-quality leads.
Nurturing the Leads: Once you have filtered your leads, you can start working on getting them to close. Following up with them is extremely important here. This is how you keep tabs on the entire operation. Make sure you ask the right questions when you contact them. Some examples include: “What kind of features are you looking for in your managed services provider?”, “Is there something we can do to make this work?”

Marketing is extremely important for every MSP. By ensuring you don’t make the same mistakes that most new MSPs are making, you can improve your business considerably.

Controlling your Cloud Data in the Face of Outages

November 29, 2016 Kris Price

It’s hard to imagine that one quick lightning strike could disrupt the business of several companies across Europe, but this is exactly what happened in the summer of 2011 in Dublin.

After a lightning bolt struck a utility pole, causing an explosion and fire, power supply was cut to several businesses and data centres in the surrounding area. According to Amazon and Microsoft — the two companies whose data centres were worst affected — the bolt disrupted power supply to their massive data centres. While Microsoft was able to kick start its services after a few hours, Amazon’s services weren’t resumed until a good 48 hours later. Amazon’s customers spent several frustrating hours waiting for Amazon to report on the status, as the company struggled to set things right and quickly restore their services.

You might say, this is an old news that happened more than five years ago, but this very instance shows how unplanned disasters can strike at any time. With this in mind, Backup Technology Limited (BTL) believes there are several lessons to be learnt from this and many other data centre outages.

Complete dependency on the service provider’s ability to maintain uninterrupted service is foolhardy, to say the least. Customers signing up for cloud services must ensure that they maintain control over their data by making local backups of their data in addition to riding the cloud for all the benefits that accrue from it. BTL urges its customers to take advantage of its Asigra powered software, a hybrid cloud backup solution that ensures full-proof data availability.

BTL is equipped with local and remote management features, which allow users to seamlessly perform local backups to their private cloud infrastructure or offsite backups to a public cloud. Even more beneficial, they can do so even while they’re away from the office. A web-based management console allows one to control and manage all backups and restores via an Internet connection.

To ensure full business continuity, BTL stresses the importance of performing both local and offsite, cloud backup. If backing up data to the cloud, BTL recommends that customers add disaster recovery and business continuity to their list of services.

Unlike larger cloud customers such as Amazon’s public cloud users, BTL users who backup data locally to their private cloud infrastructure, in addition to a cloud service powered by BTL, will not have to wait endlessly for reports about the restoration of services in the event of an offsite data centre disaster. They can connect their network to the local copy of the data and resume their business activities almost instantaneously.

When handling business data backup plans, smart IT admins look at all their options and will not hesitate to implement local backup AND offsite cloud backup with an MSP to ensure security and business continuity at all times. BTL recognises the ground realities surrounding data management by large third parties. This is why BTL focuses its attention on customer needs and urge its customers to build in an extra resilience and maintain data redundancy.

The Theory of Constraints and Cloud Backup

September 29, 2016 Sam Broadbent

Dr. Eliyahu Moshe Goldratt [1] in his Theory of Constraints [2] stated that the strength of any chain, process or system is determined by its weakest link. Successful systems identify the constraints and effects, the changes necessary to remove them. Small and medium enterprises that are IT constrained must, therefore, make an effort to change their operative methodologies and harness the cloud to strengthen their business operations. Interestingly, a number of cloud based IT services are emerging to support IT constrained organisations.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) options available in the cloud allow SMBs harness expensive infrastructure at nominal costs to exploit available, in-house IT skills. Unlimited instances of servers are made available virtually and cost effectively. SMBs can use this IT infrastructure to build new versions of applications without investing in additional hardware resources. The IT resources can also be used for hosting enterprise websites and reaching out globally to customers leaving the non-core activities of website maintenance, such as traffic monitoring to experts who provide the infrastructure.

IaaS is priced on a pay-as-you-go model and organisations have to pay only for usage of instances of servers and the software environment loaded, in databases or web servers, application development environments or the amount of network traffic in and out of the server during usage.

Software as a Service (SaaS) options in the cloud are attractive to SMBs that do not want to invest money in purchasing software licenses. Software access is provided on demand and deployed over the Internet to the local system. The software runs behind a firewall on a local area network or a personal computer with the SaaS provider holding the license for the software. The pay-as-you-go model is advantageous to the user. The software is accessible from anywhere with an Internet connection. There is no local server installation required and can be rapidly scaled and eminently reliable. System maintenance and security improvements are the responsibility of the SaaS vendor.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) delivers a computing platform and a solution stack to the IT constrained organisation. PaaS is an uncomplicated offering of web-based applications and services. The user does not have to worry about the underlying hardware or the complexities of the software being used to deliver the service.

PaaS includes facilities for application design, application development, testing, deploying and hosting of application services for collaboration, web service integration, marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management, application versioning and facilitation of a host of other services. All these solutions are provisioned and delivered via the web using the Internet.

Backup Technology Limited (BTL), based in Leeds, UK, is a globally trusted cloud backup company, which provides simple, automatic, secure, encrypted cloud backup and storage services. Visit www.backup-technology.com

[1] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliyahu_M._Goldratt

[2] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints

Why BTL’s Cloud Backup Outperforms the Competition?

September 28, 2016 Callum Huddlestone

People in search of great cloud services are always asking the same questions and expecting to find new answers! There are no new questions. There are only new answers. Let us look at some of the common questions that are asked:

How does this new technology advantage me?
How is it different from the current technology I use?
Where will my data reside?
Will my data be secure?
How will I have control over my data?
What kind of tools will I have for managing my data?

Backup Technology Limited (BTL) has not been asked anything significantly different or new. But, it has a lot of new answers to tough questions that are frequently asked. BTL has created a cloud platform that addresses the most recalcitrant problems of customers and resolves them to their satisfaction! This speaks volumes on how BTL has been taking its mission seriously!

The cloud computing infrastructure proposed by BTL Cloud Backup is exciting. BTL is committed to the task it has undertaken. It has partnered with leading technology vendors to provide customer friendly solutions. The integration and interoperability of the product further delivers a combined solution to frequently encountered customer problems and provides a high level of data protection solutions. The methods of deployment, the virtualisation options, simplification of provisioning, application services, increased availability, reduced environmental impact, and business continuity are some, not all, of the compelling reasons for adopting this great technology from BTL.

BTL’s Cloud Backup is an affordable option. It delivers a number of financial advantages to its users. It brings, in its wake, cost advantages and flexibilities that are rarely enjoyed with other IT innovations. Customers signing up for the platform can replace CAPEX with OPEX as the infrastructure is rented not owned. This results in reduced hardware investment and maintenance costs, reduced capacity needs, reduced technology risks, increased productivity, and improved user experience. Furthermore, BTL’s innovative approach to IT supports green computing and accommodates the globalisation aspirations of enterprises.

BTL’s Cloud Backup is easy to deploy. The software almost configures itself and wizard screens guide the user over the humps and bumps of installing and commissioning the software and initiating the backup. Administrators can create, edit, run backup sets, restore and delete files or view user-activity logs from a central management console anywhere, anytime, using a web-browser-based interface that merely requires input parameters for authentication and authorisation. The easy to use dashboard comes with robust features and functionalities, smart defaults for effective and efficient management of your data. The data itself resides in an encrypted format on secure physical or virtual servers that are systematically and dynamically replicated/mirrored for high availability and disaster recovery.

BTL offers multi-level support to users of their cloud platform. Customer satisfaction is very important for BTL and it has shown its eagerness to help its customers by deploying dedicated service personnel.

Customers, who want to know more about how the service works or how they can optimise on the cloud storage platform, can take advantage of the elaborate knowledge base BTL has developed. Trial versions of the software can be downloaded and tested free of charge for a period of 30 days before any buying decisions need to be made!

BTL utilises 256-bit AES security and multiple data centres located on two continents to ensure data protection and availability. BTL offers IT service providers a secure data solution combined with a robust partner program, the efficiencies of full web-based account management, and an industry leading technical support team. Visit www.backup-technology.com