VoIP Solutions for Enterprises

Enterprises need to ensure that the SLA includes a minimum of 99.999 uptime, also known as “five nines.” This amounts to under six minutes of downtime in any given year. Apart from the percentage guarantee, the SLA needs to include financial penalties substantial enough to capture the real cost of downtime. It is important for the vendor to reveal their infrastructure locations, failover architecture, and the previous uptimes. Maintenance should not count towards uptime time, and it should be done in off-peak hours and with prior notification.

VoIP systems for businesses belonging to regulated industries offer multiple layers of compliance features. The first layer comprises features such as end-to-end encryption, data residency features, which ensure that call data remains within the geographical bounds specified by the user, and SOC 2 Type II Certification at the infrastructure level. In terms of features, these are automatic call recording with tamperproof storage of calls with customizable retention periods, role-based access to recordings by limiting access based on roles, audit trails of access to all functions of the system, and pausing the call recording process when confidential information is being exchanged. For each regulated industry, the vendor should be able to show compliance with respective frameworks, like HIPAA, FINRA, PCI DSS, or GDPR.

Yes. Many businesses have integrated Microsoft Teams or another collaboration platform for messaging and video and require that their enterprise calling capabilities be integrated into the collaboration platform itself as opposed to being integrated alongside the platform as an additional application. Several VoIP vendors provide Direct Routing and Operator Connect services, which allow carriers to provide carrier-grade PSTN calling right inside the Microsoft Teams platform. This can also be done in case of other popular collaboration platforms like Google Workspace and Cisco Webex.

Enterprise migrations usually take from three to twelve months depending on the organization's complexity. The key drivers for time impact are the number of locations to migrate; complexity of legacy integration, which needs to be rebuilt or rewritten; availability of internal IT resources to perform the project; and speed of the number porting process, which may depend on the number of numbers to be ported and cooperation of the incumbent carrier. The most frequent cause of delays in an enterprise migration is underallocation of internal project management resources for the project. One of the main success factors of a large-scale migration is having an internal project owner.

All existing phone numbers, from individual employee phone numbers that allow direct dial-in to the office main number, toll-free numbers, and departmental numbers, can all be transferred to the new VoIP solution. Number transfer is generally handled per location as part of the phased migration approach. While transferring numbers per location, all calls placed to existing numbers will be routed properly without any disruption to the business processes. Depending upon the carrier and the number of phone numbers to be transferred, the process takes anywhere between two and four weeks post submission. Your VoIP provider would coordinate the whole process for you.

Enterprise VoIP hosted in the cloud is designed to support a flexible workforce. The employees can dial in via a softphone application in their laptop or the smartphone application in their phone, without regard to the physical place where they happen to be. The call quality would depend upon the quality of the Internet connection provided by the employee rather than the network infrastructure or hardware. In the case of enterprise deployment, there is usually information about network needs at home offices, suggested headsets for remote workers, and security configurations like using a VPN or accessing the cloud directly.

Enterprise VoIP systems are structured on a hierarchical administration structure. The entire administration control lies with the global IT department, and they have full access to the system, all user accounts, all location profiles, all routing profiles, and all compliance and security profiles. Below that, the location-based administrators could have restricted access to managing all the users, extensions, and configurations related to their location alone and not those that can affect others. The head of the departments or team managers could be given even more restricted access, like being able to manage the call routing profiles of their own team members or the voicemail settings of their own team members.