With increasing IP telephony service and equipment options, there has never been a more opportune time for businesses to find communication solutions to fit their business needs. A communication solution must be able to provide flexibility to the workforce, refocus IT staff, consolidate vendor and provider relationships and lower cost.

With premise-based onsite solutions, the infrastructure should be installed and maintained by the company, and the external voice lines should also be provisioned. With hosted PBX services, the management of the entire system rests with the service provider, and the voice connectivity runs over either dedicated or shared IP connections to single or several locations.

Hosted PBX Services

In addition, hosted PBX service providers go beyond ordinary telephony service, bundling their products with a host of features and capabilities that incorporate elements of fully unified communications solutions. Such capabilities entail business application integration, video solutions, remote collaboration, mobility, web conferencing and integrated audio.

Hosted PBX services ensure that there is business continuity. For instance, if a business premise becomes inaccessible, it is possible to relocate a phone line without complex hardware installation. If the Wide Area Network (WAN) is lost and all communications within the premise are cut off, service providers can use mobile unified communications to reestablish a connection.

With hosted PBX solutions, staffs that were traditionally dedicated towards maintaining the hardware based system can be relocated to other mission critical areas, allowing the organization to re-focus on other initiatives, enabling them to reduce their overall operating costs.

For organizations with multiple satellite offices, hosted PBX solutions will deliver a centralized online portal connecting the different locations and remote employees, enhancing internal communications.

Some of the common features with hosted PBX providers include caller ID, call accept/reject, music on hold/transfer, text message notification, fax to e-mail, voicemail to e-mail, dial by name, simultaneous calls, multiple extensions, call routing and auto attendant.

Additionally, one factor to consider is cost analysis. In order to quantify the real benefits of a hosted PBX solution versus a premise based solution, scenarios should be compared on a midterm basis (this could be between a three to five year period).

In evaluating various cost components, various primary categories should be thoroughly reviewed. These include:

Upfront and installation costs. The organization should factor in the onetime software and hardware purchases including items such as routers/gateways, IP Phones, PBX's, dedicated broadband connection and installation and training charges.

Hosted service fees. Here the organization should carefully evaluate the monthly fees over the three to five year period and compare them to the cost of an in-house managed solution.

Equipment maintenance and upgrade. This involves annual maintenance contracts and the costs involved with upgrading the IP PBX to the latest software.

Operations and administration. This involves the cost of maintaining a staff that can administer the IP PBX system versus maintaining in-house solutions that consume physical space and power.

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Networks should support both volume traffic as well as the increased requirements for security, analytics and compliance. As networks expand exponentially, there is a natural tendency for the network traffic to increase at each monitoring point. With today's business needs, business applications are hosted on these same networks. In addition, these same networks also host critical clients, product, and business information. With such vital resources in one place, ensuring uptime is a challenge because there are various threats, including information theft, viruses, denial of service attacks and hackers. These threats could easily lead to downtimes and loss of data. If a business depends on a network, network monitoring services are extremely beneficial.

Network Monitoring Services

There are various tools in the market that enable testing of different metrics such as jitter, delay, bandwidth, packet loss, and throughput. Some of the most popular tools used in network performance and monitoring include:

BBMonitor. This is a commercial Windows-based application. This particular software monitors the bandwidth usage and Internet connection speed test. The application monitors all the incoming and outgoing traffic and the data derived is stored in databases. The software comes with features that enable users to create charts using data from the repository so that the administrator can make a decision in regards to the health of the network.

CommView. A commercial based application that runs with Windows, this software monitors Internet and Local Area Network (LAN) activity, and at the same time automatically captures and analyzes the network traffic. The application works by collecting information about data that passes through Ethernet and then decodes the same data. It also lists all the available network connections, local and remote IP's while simultaneously examining individual packets.

Advanced host monitor. This is a network administration tool that monitors the file/folder size, DNS servers, mail, FTP, web and network traffic. This application also comes with capabilities to check on SQL servers, CPU usage, disk space, and TCP services.

GFI network server monitor. This particular application monitors the network for any failures or irregularities. As a result, network availability is maximized because various aspects of windows and Linux servers, workstations and devices like routers and gateways are proactively monitored. When this software detects any failure, alerts are automatically sent via network messages, e-mail, pager, or SMS. This software also comes with capabilities to automatically login to the terminal server and verify if the session was properly established. In addition, GFI can check on disk partition and space, group membership, file/folder size, printer availability, and CPU usage.

Smoke Ping. An open source application that works under UNIX environment, this software measures, stores, and displays latency distribution and packet loss. The application supports dynamic IP and courtesy of the RRD tool, smoke ping has a built-in repository that enables data to be presented in form of graphs, making it possible to define latency or pattern loss.

You can get more information about Hosted PBX Services,Network Monitoring Services by visiting Opentek