Cloud-based phone systems are a phone service delivered via the internet. Other terms include “internet based phone system” or more commonly “VoIP” (Voice over Internet Protocol). All of these refer to a group of phones that work together to route calls using an internet connection. A VoIP cloud-based phone system doesn’t rely on traditional on-premise hardware or costly maintenance. When you subscribe to a cloud-based phone system, you eliminate the need to have an on-site infrastructure. This means you don’t need a whole IT team to maintain your phone lines. Typically this can save your business 40-80% on your phone bill.

Cloud VoIP overall costs less per minute than leading landline phone services. No matter what your call volume and usage, it’s almost guaranteed that a cloud based phone system will cost you less each month than a landline service.The provider will take care of everything, from hosting to upgrades to maintenance, so there is no need for you to spend time hiring technical contractors to monitor your system.

Additionally, cloud-based phone systems offer geographic flexibility that allow you to work remotely without hassle. Cloud-based phone systems allow you to work anywhere with a working Internet connection. You can set up an IP phone, plug in your laptop, or use a soft phone on your smartphone to make phone calls from your cloud phone system. This means you can work from home, on the go, or as a full time remote employee.

Geographic flexibility is also a great tool for connecting your offices under one phone system. If you have offices in multiple locations, a cloud based phone system can connect your entire company to the same phone service, and have it managed by a single administrator from any location.One great benefit of cloud-based phone systems is that it can be easily scaled up as your company grows. It’s easy to add extensions or direct numbers with just a few clicks.

Another advantage of cloud-based systems is that they usually have very small amounts of downtime due to servers being spread across geographic locations. If a cloud-based phone system provider has good redundancy, their downtime figure should be close to zero.

Overall, cloud-based telephony is simple and cost-effective. It allows small businesses to deliver better and faster output than those using traditional systems. Employees spend less time managing their phones, and more time doing value-added activities.
At Seismic, we develop customized cloud-based phone system solutions that suit your specific business needs. Whatever your requirements, we can integrate smart applications that enable you to handle a variety of tasks on your network. Whether your network is large or small, we can transition your operations onto a cloud-based platform with the goal of offering greater flexibility, greater control, and lower total cost of operation.

With the rise of cloud computing and cloud services, vigilance towards security in the cloud is ever more critical. As more businesses transition to the cloud, it is imperative to protect critical information from theft, data leakage and deletion. Malicious attacks on cloud networks can cause loss or theft of intellectual property; create compliance violations and regulatory actions; represent contractual breaches with customers or business partners; and can ultimately lead to diminished customer trust and loss of revenue.

The security objectives of confidentiality, integrity, availability, authenticity, accountability, liability and privacy form the basis for IT security in general, and these same objectives apply when considering security in the cloud. In SaaS environments, there must be a shared responsibility: while the user, or customer, controls the data, the cloud service provides the application and, therefore, must apply the necessary application security measures.

These include:
• Security by design and source code analysis;
• Security and vulnerability testing;
• Secure deployment; and
• Protection against manipulation and threats during runtime.

Whatever the structure between the user/customer and cloud service provider, however, the following best practices should be followed in order to prevent and avoid malicious activity:

Control access

Utilize identity and access control tools, and know who has access to what data and when. When creating identity and access control policies, grant the minimum set of privileges needed and temporarily grant additional permissions when needed. Configure security groups to have the narrowest focus possible, and use reference security group IDs where possible.

Protect data

Another common mistake is to leave data unencrypted on the cloud.Storing sensitive data in the cloud without putting in place appropriate controls to prevent access to server and protecting the data is irresponsible and can lead to devastating consequences.Encryption is a fail-safe—even if a security configuration fails and the data falls into the hands of an unauthorized party, the data cannot be used.

Secure credentials

Create unique keys for each external service, and restrict access following the principle of least privilege. Make sure the keys don’t have broad permissions, as in the wrong hands, they can be used to access sensitive resources and data.

Practice security hygiene

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) provides an extra layer of protection on top of the username and password, making it harder for attackers to break in. MFA should be enabled to restrict access to the management consoles, dashboards, and privileged accounts.

Improve visibility

Major cloud providers all offer some level of logging tools, so make sure to turn on security logging and monitoring to see unauthorized access attempts and other issues.

Organizations need to regularly assess the security of their cloud environments, and also that of their vendors, suppliers, and partners. At Seismic, we provide comprehensive cloud security solutions, working with your business to ensure that your critical data is safe and secure both within the cloud and within your organization.

From the advent of telecom-based communications, technological evolution has been happening at a breakneck pace. From the early days of rotary dial phones and tone dialing quickly came voice-over IP and IP telephony. These technologies changed the world of telecommunications as traditional TDM technology transformed into VOIP.

While the industry was settling down with the IP revolution, SIP emerged into the telecom arena and caused a new wave of changes, offering diversified yet simple tools and multi-modal communication means. The invention of SIP changed the way people communicate, moving away from vendor agnostic hardware and end-points and making it conducive to use any device.This BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) concept provided greater flexibility and ease of use. It also revolutionized calling through service providers, thereby bringing down the overall cost of calling.

In the next wave the telecom evolution, automation hasthe telecom industry by bringing advanced tools and sophistication. The overriding objective of automation isto be more responsive, focused and efficient in resolving or pre-empting faults, while also reducing operational costs and avoiding unnecessary expenditure. Automation offers tremendous benefits for telecom and its diverse base of customers as we move into an era of a more aggressive and challenging market.

As telecom companies are adopting technologies like virtualization and SDN, artificial intelligence is also going to play a big role in the integration of these technologies and the automation of networks.

On the end user side, AI and machine learning will help telecom operators in subscriber profiling, as well as in analyzing offer conversion rates, content usage trends, and network activity. This will help them push offers that are tailored as per user needs at the right time.

Emerging technologies such as IoT and the cloud are enabling networks to handle higher volumes of data, therefore making automation an imperative for better network planning and connectivity. Big data analytics, AI and machine learning capabilities will enhance the customer experience through automated detection, troubleshooting and optimization of telecom networks.

AI-based intelligent network applications such as precision algorithms can provide intelligent network optimization solutions, as well asadvanced tools for network operation and maintenance. Further, AI technology will also lead to the evolution of automatic, self-optimizing and self-healing networks, complimented with high-performance computing power and data analytics capabilities.

AI-enabled networks can think beyond their correlative programming and suggest outcome-based scenarios. In the future, AI will be able to differentiate between correlative and causal, and proactively pursue their own choice of outcomes beyond the scope of human programming, and before any problems are noticed by the end users. It’s an exciting time for the telecom industry, and these new technologies are enabling us to be more efficient, effective, and connected than ever before.

Advantage Care Physicians is one of the largest medical groups in the New York metro area, serving half a million patients with 36 offices across the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, as well as Long Island. When ACP required assistance in configuring customized messages for their night service and holiday schedule, they reached out to Seismic for support. After receiving the brief from ACP, Seismic got to work on the task. Taking into consideration the particularities required for a hospital network, Seismic engineers assisted the client by converting audio files into a standard system codec format and uploading call recordings to their call platform. After uploading the recordings, there was issue with call flow for which Seismic’s engineers extended their time and corrected the issue. The engineers also configured the call flow with new VDN’s and vectors. The client was pleased with the service provided and appreciated Seismic’s ownership of the issue and time spent ensuring the issue was resolved and the call systems were working smoothly.

Event Monitoring is an integral part of remote monitoring, which involves maintaining a customer’s voice network through an organized system of product alarms. To manage event monitoring for its clients, Seismic uses a combination of SM diagnostic tools, interventions, and resolutions which are carried out by a team of remote technicians and engineers.

Over the past few years, AI-enabled technologies have made significant changes in the work flow and processes involved with event monitoring.AI helps detect performance and availability issues, which also helps in pinpointing problem areas and in determining the source of the issue. AI incorporates machine learning, control systems and various other technologies to optimize productivity in the execution and delivery of services.

Seismic uses a Java based application that resides at our customers’ locations and which provides connectivity and monitoring capabilities. This server is also referred to as a remote intelligence gateway (RIG) or connectivity server. The automated actions this service management tool has transformed includes the following tasks:

Opening tickets based on the service catalog
Updating ticket SLAs based on priority
Setting ticket attributes based on categories
Initiating ticketing status workflows

Automation saves our clients’ enterprises a significant amount of money in terms of operating costs, and it also frees up our engineers to focus their efforts on more mission-critical tasks and projects, particularly those pertaining to increasing customer satisfaction rates.

AI can be broadly defined as a series of computers carrying out their own, autonomous tasks, and utilizing machine learning to obtain foresight and make better choices towards their tasks.

The majority of early investments in AI were concentrated on optimizing customer discussion workflows. Some increasingly-common examples of AI in practice are its applications towards streamlining order processing flows; another example is using smart robots to recognize a possible topic of a client query, in order to react quickly with the necessary information. In the realm of UC, we are still in the early stages of building AI capabilities into realtime collaborations. But over the last few years there have been numerous joint venture announcements which have served to advance AI services into the area of collaboration.

Optimizing customer support interactions

One possible UC scenario that can be streamlined using AI: Client A receives a telephone or text message from Customer B. The AI engine automatically pulls the the log of their previous written communications, any files that they may have exchanged, and comments from a client relationship management or ERP platform. This empowers the client to get the information that they want at the ready, streamlining the interaction with the customer.

With AI-integrated solutions, it becomes possible for customer service representatives to have important information/documents at the ready to service customers based on previous interactions. Taking it a step further, we can see a future where employees utilize language-based robots – think in the realm of Siri or Amazon Echo – to gather the information they want prior to attending calls or performing specific tasks.

At its Ignite summit in September 2016, Microsoft emphasized the ways it is seeking to utilize its Cortana voice portal to handle inter-personnel communications. Comparable to the Cisco-IBM strategy, Cortana could serve as a digital helper for client engagements, managing scheduled jobs and bringing appropriate data into customer engagements.

It is imperative that IT leaders discuss within their organization and with business software vendors to strategize road maps towards integrating AI into their business practices. While AI services are still being developed in the realm collaboration, executives should anticipate these trends and incorporate them into their road maps. Businesses that leverage AI to enhance internal and external collaboration and communications are going to have a distinct advantage over companies which delay in executing these steps.