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April 14, 2010

Disaster Recovery Plan: When disaster strikes your ready!

Filed under: Prevention — Administrator @ 12:25 pm

Winters in New England are known for being brutal, but this Spring has brought in some serious showers and flooding-whereas you might be personally prepared-is your business?

Inclement weather can cause chaos on telephones or data services and many companies only realize the importance of Recovery planning AFTER an outage or disaster has occurred. Don’t let this happen to your company-advanced planning can minimize undesired effects on your technological solutions.

What you can do:

  • Write out a plan considering the utmost disaster-this will give you coverage for the lesser disasters at the same time!
  • BACK UP! BACK UP! BACK UP! Important daily output should be documented and backed up.
  • Make sure all your licensing code and passwords are stored in a safe place that can be recovered in the event of a disaster.
  • Create a document of your plan and let your employees be aware of emergency procedures.  Make sure this document has important contacts and clearly defines the roles of your employees in case of an emergency.
  • Have a number your incoming calls can be re-routed to in case phone services are out.
  • Have redundancy hardware and make sure you have two completely different circuits with absolutely no shared facilities and being fed by different central offices.
  • Have a battery-powered AM/FM radio on hand. In the event of a communications or electrical disruption some radio stations will be operating on back-up power.
  • In the event of an electrical storm, do not use a corded telephone. Also, unplug modems, faxes, and computers from the phone line. There is a possibility of an electrical charge running through the line.
  • Review your plan often to make sure it is up to date.

Disaster planning is one of the most important IT projects a company can take on-think about it-what if your company could not use phones for the day-how about computers?  Can your company afford the aftermath of a disaster? A well thought out Disaster Recovery Plan will protect your business and prevent total loss during an emergency, whether big or small.

April 7, 2010

Telecom Review: What you don’t know can cost you!

Filed under: phone systems — Tags: , , , — Administrator @ 1:09 pm

Dollar_signAn important and almost always overlooked strategy for a company to save money is for a telecom review. A telecom review is an audit of your telecommunications network billing and contracts, done by professionals who can find money saving errors. Telecom services account for one of the five largest expenses a business will face and with the many changes in the business and communications world what was good then may not be in your best interest now, so it is always imperative to stay on top of your telecom contract and here is why:

Telecom Bill contracts usually run 3 years and will typically go into automatic renewal. With confusing and complex billing-overcharges and outdated telecom fees can be easily overlooked. All too many times businesses are getting charged for services they no longer use or have cancelled. According to a study by Gartner Group, a leading information technology research and advisory company, “When it comes to telephone and data bills, an estimated $13 billion in overcharges will be generated in the next 12 months, and less than 2% of these telephone billing errors will ever be identified.”

All too often, businesses pay their telecom bill without a review of the actual charges or costs, which can lead to fraudulent and inaccurate billing. On average 85% of companies do not audit their bills which causes them to over spend by about 45%. Toll fraud hacking into corporate telecom networks is averaged to cost more that $1 billion dollars a year annually, how much of this 1 billion could be in your company?

Don’t let your company suffer from inaccurate billing and erroneous charges-by addressing cost issues and management issues you can cut costs and benefit instantly! Here at Spaulding Hill we offer a free telecom assessment. If you would like a FREE assessment please click here or call 866-441-7469.