Hosted Systems Are More Secure 21/2/11
Posted by Birchills Telecom on Mon, Feb 21, 2011 @ 09:16 AM
Keeping data and systems in the Birchills Telecom makes it very difficult for thieves
Until last year I owned some offices in Salford near Manchester. In fact they overlooked the M602 motorway. The area was not the best area ever as can be judged by the fact that the houses opposite were selling for £9,000 each. This meant that we spent a lot of money on security. So there was an outer perimeter fence, outer shutters on the windows, inner bars on the windows and a security alarm fitted. All this did stop the casual thefts that we had when we first bought the building.
Early one day we had a call from the police who had attended when the alarm went off. The thieves had crossed a railway line to get to the motorway, scaled the motorway fence, run across the motorway jumping the central barrier and climbed the other motorway fence. Our building was at the top of a 3 metre embankment, so they scaled that and then ripped down our chain link fence. They then ripped the shutters off the outside window, broke the glass and jimmied open the internal bars. The alarms were going off by this point so they figured they didn’t have very long. The 2 lads grabbed a couple of computers a piece - breaking the security cables tags in the process and fled.
Now it wasn't easy to get in but repeating the process carrying 4 semi smashed desktop computers was a lot harder. They managed to get across the motorway and the train track but by the time they had got there they had dropped everything they had stolen. So they risked everything for nothing.
The point of this story apart from illustrating how monumentally stupid people can be, is that we suddenly had lost our computers. Fortunately we didn't have to worry about the data on them because it was scattered along the M602.
However we still had a business to run. Fortunately again the business was not that time sensitive and the main source of data was on remote servers. So by the time the fences and windows had been fixed we were back up and running.
Merrill Lynch the American bank has been praising one it's employees who had her flat broken into and 3 laptops stolen. The company laptop however was chained down and so they left it. It is hardly surprising that Merrill Lynch are paranoid when they managed to lose data on 33 thousand people in 2007 when a laptop was stolen.
All of this left me thinking what would happen if you had installed a nice new piece of software like 3CX or Asterisk to run your telephone systems. Getting that computer stolen would mean that you couldn’t make phone calls for days. If you had done this you would know about all of the pain and heartache configuring such a system gave you and to do it again and quickly would not be the first thing you wanted to do when you needed to start again.
We all know how we miss phones when they don't work and surely it can't make sense to leave it all to a computer in the corner to do it all and just pray it doesn't get stolen or broken. Using a hosted service means that you gain access to computers in a secure environment, protected not only against theft but also fire. They are backed up without you bothering and they are always up to date with the latest software. Even better you don't have to pay for the hardware.
Believe me next time thieves come calling you will be glad that you had the foresight to install a hosted system.
About Birchills Telecom
Birchills Telecom provides reliable cloud based communication systems for SME's, based on high speed internet telephony- hosted voice over internet protocol (VOIP). We are small and friendly and very green.
We offer a simple system that is available next day without any of the hard sell based on a reliable product.
Without any capital expenditure you gain the benefits of free calls within our network and less expensive calls outside. The system represents a giant leap in functionality, is never out of date, has no maintenance charges and is at a fraction of previous pricing models.
The team has developed our platform and the technology behind it. Birchills Telecom is the only company to concentrate purely on our Internet based solution – the switchboard in the sky.
We give you :-
• Free calls within the network.
• Lowest subscription costs in UK.
This is third generation hosted VoIP made simple powered by SIP available on demand.
Author
By David Hill, Chairman, Birchills Telecom
