In this, my final
article in a series of five looking into the various
aspects of telecoms business continuity and the importance
of maintaining your mission critical means of communication
with your customers, or your customer’s customers,
I am going to explore, and try to explain, both the
benefits, and more importantly the pitfalls, of deploying
what is being hailed as the panacea of all future
communications – VoIP – and how its deployment
can have a serious impact on the resilience of your
Call Centre operation.
To fully appreciate, from an operational point of
view, the impact of deploying what is commonly referred
to as “VoIP” I think it appropriate examine
precisely what this new technology is and to explain
that there are, in fact, two, very different applications
of “VoIP” which have two very different
implications for any business.
The first, appropriately known as “IP Telephony”,
is used where organisations (call centre operators)
have a number of different sites (or at least two!)
where there is a need to seamlessly link the two,
or more, Call Centres together with access to both
voice and data via a converged voice and date network – without
incurring on-going call charges when transferring
inbound calls. True IP Telephony, whilst still it
its formative years, is maturing quickly and is being
deployed ever more successfully by an increasing
number of companies, both large and small who wish
to take advantage of benefits of true convergence
technologies of fully integrating voice and data
technologies. Importantly, such installations are
implemented as part of a dedicated, individual company
owned solution and protected from the vagaries of
the hackers, worm and virus writers (hopefully) by
the company’s sophisticated firewalls and security
policies. Implementation invariably requires a significant
upgrading of all security aspects of a company’s
data network prior to use for IP Telephony.
This concept can be further explained using the
analogy of a medieval castle with its resilient,
un-scalable perimeter walls and deep/wide moat surrounding
the castle epitomising a company’s (secure?)
Local/Wide/Global Area Networks, the (single?) drawbridge
of whatever width, epitomising the controlled connectivity
from/to the outside world i.e. the traditional TDM/PSTN
digital voice and data circuits, and the most important
part of all, the portcullis, preventing the entry
of unwanted visitors to the castle constituting the
firewall that prevents (all?) unwanted “visitors” (worms,
viruses, spam etc) from entering the sanctity of
the castle – the company’s internal network.
Once the incoming voice and data packets have successfully
passed all of the security checks and are safely
inside the castle, the converged voice and data is
free to travel all around the castle – subject,
of course, to the various internal security controls
set by the owner of the castle – the Company’s
IT/Compliance Team.
This is where IP Telephony comes into its own – linking
any number of offices together with both voice and
data from within the safety and security of the firewall – delivering “free” voice
calls between offices and all of the benefits that
can be gained from a truly “converged voice
and data network” BUT what happens when you
have two, or three or more drawbridges and portcullises?
and/or the security guards fall asleep, or at best
are not as diligent as they should be when allowing
people into the castle? Once inside the castle the
infiltrators (also referred to as Trojan Horses for,
now obvious reasons?) are free to roam anywhere within
the castle and to rape and pillage to their hearts
content – until caught! It can therefore be
seen how vulnerable a company using converged technologies
can be – if their combined voice and data network
security is not of the highest order because now,
all of your voice AND data traffic is in one converged
network whereby if you lose one…you lose them
both – possibly across the whole network.
The second application, being a true reflection
of the term “VoIP”, and referred to as
Internet Telephony is the delivery of voice calls
over the public Internet – hence the name Voice
over Internet Protocol - and, as such, is far less
reliable in that, whilst the technology used for
sending voice calls over a data network remains the
same, the medium over which it is carried is no longer
a privately owned and controlled, dedicated network
used in IP Telephony. It now travels over the public
Internet where “bandwidth” is at a premium
being fought over by any number of users. However,
the issues surrounding sufficient bandwidth and Broadband
technologies was addressed in some detail in last
month’s article and remain equally relevant
to this article.
Use of VoIP applications can best be illustrated
by using a second analogy by drawing a comparison
between the M6 Motorway and the M6 Toll Road. As
most, if not all of you will know, travelling times
on the M6 can be somewhat of a lottery – not
knowing how many delays you will incur along the
way, what speed you will be travelling through areas
of congestion – which may be bad today and
clear tomorrow, with no way of knowing why. Conversely,
the M6 Toll Road provides those who wish to pay a
little extra for their journey, with a pretty well
assured trouble free, and fast, passage down a three
lane, still lightly used (in comparison) motorway.
This is one of the differences between the deployment
of IP Telephony, where companies have gone to the
expense of building their own “motorways”,
in essence Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) between
office locations, (different segments within their “castle”)
and those relying on Internet Telephony where voice
calls take their chance travelling on the much used
M6 motorway.
Furthermore, and returning to our medieval castle
analogy for a moment, the deployment of true VoIP,
linking remote / homeworkers to your far more secure
IP telephony infrastructure, has just created innumerable “holes” through
your castle wall (connections to each and every
remote / homeworker) requiring a security guard
(firewall) at every “hole” to prevent
tenacious infiltrators (viruses and worms) to penetrate
the castle defences!
Having explained, in some detail how the principles
of surrounding the uses of IP technology I trust
you have a better understanding of where the pitfalls
lie in deploying either “flavour” of
IP Telephony when it comes to considering the resilience
of both voice and data connectivity into your own
call centre operation – remembering that using
traditional voice and data connectivity, when you
lose your data connection, say email?, you probably
still have your voice connection so you can still
speak to your customers even if you do not have access
to your central data and visa versa. BUT lose your
IP connection and you have suddenly lost BOTH.
Ominously, this is the one major issue which is
so often overlooked when considering the deployment
of either form of VoIP. The contingency planning
for when your VoIP phone system fails. We have all
become complacent with the inherent stability and
reliability of our conventional telephone systems.
Now with a new breed of telephone IP Based telephony
systems being promoted by over zealous sales personnel,
it is important to understand the chain of complex
dependencies a VoIP telephone solution relies upon.
Whereas a conventional phone system failure is simple
to resolve in that the fault will be either faulty
connectivity to site, a failed PABX, or a power issue,
all easily identified and easily solved, a VoIP phone
installation has a far greater scope for failure
than a conventional phone system, indeed most IT
departments don’t have the equipment or skills
to fault-find this complex technology and resolve
a major problem in a realistic time period. By way
of example the failure of a VoIP telephone system
could be due to a fault or miss configuration of
any one of a number of possible failures requiring
expert knowledge in both IP technology generally
AND your own system configuration.
In conclusion, it should be emphasised that whilst
the deployment of IP Telephony can provide significant
benefits for call centre operators using converged
technologies, the technology itself is extremely
complex and careful thought should be given to how
you are going to maintain your chosen application
when it goes wrong – as it surely will – like
any other new technology does. Maintaining telecommunications
is arguably the most important part of a call centre’s
business and should form the focus of your continuity
/ disaster recovery plan. Accordingly careful thought
should be given to the deployment of either form
of VoIP as coping with the unknown is bad enough – but
having to deal with man-made disasters is even worse.
Five
Key Questions to Ask Yourself before Deploying an
IP Solution.
What are the real business benefits
to your business of deploying an IP solution – access
to full convergence technologies? or just the perception
of cheap outbound calls.
What are the real
costs involved in deploying such a solution and do
you understand why you have to incorporate increased
security into your existing data network.
Do
you have full trust in the vendor that is trying
to sell you an IP solution? And do they have a full
understanding of your business needs or are they
simply trying to sell you the hype that “this
is the future”?
Are you confident that
your vendor has the technical expertise to correctly
install their recommended solution – and the
ability to fault find and rectify faults as and when
they occur?
Do you have the technical expertise
internally to support / maintain your IP Network
once installed and if not identify the costs, and
most importantly the response times of your selected
maintainer to fix all subsequent faults as loss of
your IP Network means loss of all communication.
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