Does your company’s telecommunications setup reflect its purpose? By finding the right technology to support your company’s specific needs, you can strengthen your infrastructure where it needs it the most.
“Having the right technology, from a telecommunications standpoint, is going to drive your ability to roll out new applications, support existing applications, and transfer the information that those applications require between your sites, your data centers and, ultimately, your customers,” says Justin Switzer, director of strategic partnerships with Simplify Inc.
Smart Business spoke with Switzer about how telecom technology can impact your infrastructure and why what’s good for some isn’t good for others.
How can companies determine what type of technology is right for their specific needs?
It boils down to what applications or services they are running or plan to run and need to support on their network. The best way for IT to support a company’s technology is to maintain the attitude that each division or department is a customer. They should sit down with them, ask questions, listen to those answers, and provide data networking infrastructure based on what those different ‘customers’ within the company need.
When they take that type of approach it allows them to provide what the business needs, not what IT would like to have. The old adage of ‘build it and they will come’ does not work in today’s financial environment. Data networks need to be purpose-built. The type of purpose often depends on the type of business model, i.e. medical, financial, retail.
The company’s threshold for pain is also very important. Many companies can handle having their data circuit down for a couple of hours. So they will choose a lower-cost, lower-end data network like DSL cable or cellular, because they are primarily reliant on the voice side of telecommunications. They are not willing to put the investment into the data network, because it doesn’t matter as much to them.
Consider a retail environment where all sales are done over the phone. That company will invest in its infrastructure from a phone aspect as opposed to paying the high monthly costs for the higher-end data applications.
However, some companies have particular compliance issues, like HIPPA, PCI payment card industry, or Sarbanes-Oxley. A health care company may need to meet a certain level of uptime for its network in order to remain compliant with HIPPA. That company would be willing to pay for more robust data circuits because they are transmitting highly critical and sensitive patient information.