Provided by The Ideacom Network
When your business is looking for ways to cut costs and be more agile, you need to look no further than a telecom technology called Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking. SIP trunking combines data, voice and video in a single line, eliminating the need for separate physical technology to carry each one.
SIP trunking brings your business many advantages:
• Serves employees working from home or on the road by making it easy for them to make and receive calls as if they were in the office.
• Improves productivity by eliminating dropped calls.
• Saves money over the cost of a traditional analog system or Integrated Services for Digital Network (ISDN).
• Quickly and cost-effectively provides additional capacity when enlarging or relocating offices, or reducing capacity if staffing levels are flexible.
• Centralizes phone lines and provides users with a single, flexible platform to host a variety of applications that support collaboration.
SIP trunking is also a big advantage in the event of disaster.
One big benefit SIP trunking can provide — that is often overlooked — is how it can help keep your business going during natural or man-made disasters.
As history has shown, natural and man-made disasters are a fact of life and can shut your business down in an instant. Every day your business is not in operation and cannot connect with clients and customers it loses money. It’s critical to have a solid plan for recovery in the event of a disaster — and SIP trunking can help.
By providing you with a way to re-route your communication system, SIP trunking can get your business up and running fast.
Here’s how it helps:
• In the event that your business is forced to close an office in an emergency, calls can be automatically re-routed to another office or answering location. This allows your business to continue operating from any temporary location.
• SIP-supported IP PBX systems let you incorporate plug-and-play phones and programmability into your overall disaster recovery plan. This allows you to continue to conduct business and control your communications with customers, associates and vendors.
• SIP trunking includes automatic re-routing that makes it invisible to customers that you are communicating with them from an alternate location.
Why SIP trunking is a MUST-HAVE.
With SIP trunking, there is no single point of failure as there is with other telecom setups. SIP trunks direct incoming calls to specific Direct Inward Dialing (DID) telephone numbers. With this technology, an auto-attendant can be configured to let the caller reach the right person and incoming calls can be directed to that person at any location.
If the Internet bandwidth serving your location is interrupted, you can set up your system to direct the calls to other phones and other locations. If the calls are not answered, they can go to voice mail. The configuration for how calls should be handled can be changed based on time of day, day of the week and many other options. SIP trunking gives you maximum flexibility in handling incoming calls.
Traditional telecom circuitry is slowly going away. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has targeted 2018 as the year that IP replaces traditional circuit switched telephony. This change may not take place that soon, but it will take place eventually.
By including SIP trunking in your business continuity and disaster recovery plan, you reduce the impact that disasters can have on your business and its bottom line. This benefit, in addition to the inherent productivity improvements and cost reductions SIP trunking can provide, makes it a must-have for organizations of all sizes.
For more information on SIP trunking as part of your disaster recovery and business continuity plan, contact the Brookfield Group today.
