The next frontier for MSPs: Unified Communications
In the good old days phone issues were the problem of our client’s phone vendors, but today it isn’t so easy to determine who is responsible for keeping the dial-tone working. More often than not, the phone system runs on the same network as the computers. The phone system looks a lot like a server, in fact it IS on a server. Joe Panettieri who writes for MSPmentor just got back from the VoiceCon trade show in Orlando. In his most recent article titled, “Hosted Unified Communications: Will MSPs Answer the Call?” he wonders how many MSPs are willing to manage their customers’ dial-tone. He believes, “there seems to be a large opportunity for MSPs to serve small and midsize customers.” Today we have decided to improve our relationships with our client’s phone vendors as a stop gap measure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someday we (and many other MSPs) began managing our client’s dial-tone (since we seem to be doing so already).
[...] You might be surprised to learn that our online backup system hosts more than four times the data it would take to store the entire Library of Congress. In 2004 Architel began offering our client’s a free online backup solution and today almost all of them take advantage of it. Over the years the product has evolved. First, we began installing an on-site appliance to allow for a local backup of our client’s data. Only after a local backup has been created will our backup system carry that data to the servers in our data center. Finally, we use Amazon’s EC2 cloud to backup data that is local to our data center (i.e. the server being secured is in our data center). The data being created and stored by our clients is growing at an unsustainable rate – unsustainable in the sense that the current DS1/T1 infrastructure won’t support off-site backup for very much longer. Of course Architel isn’t in the telecom business – but we are being forced to solve various ‘telecom’ problems as I noted back in March in a post titled, “The next frontier for MSPs: Unified Communications“. [...]