“Why We Did It:”    IP Phone System Cuts Costs
“We’re now saving over $500 every month because of our IP phone system, and within 2 years we’ll be saving over $1000 a month,” says Jason Templeton, a licensed practical nurse and the office manager for a two-physician medical practice.
“We got an IP phone system because when the economy tightened, we had to reduce our overhead,” he says.
He produced the cost savings by converting the business’s hosted PBX phone system to an on-site Cisco IP Phone system that uses a broadband cable service to connect voice traffic to the telephone network.
A Business Network? Now’s the Time
The new IP phone system—the Cisco Smart Business Communications System (SBCS) —does more for the 18-employee business than conserve cash.
“The system has a built-in high-tech network firewall so now our data is protected,” Templeton says. “And it has definitely improved our office’s workflow, making everyone more efficient.”
Prior to the Cisco system, the office had no business network; it had just a few PCs running the practice’s management and billing software.
Templeton’s communications innovation began in 2008, when he was enticed by a price promotion from the local cable company. “They offered Internet and TV service, and eight digital phone lines, for $386 a month. That’s about one fourth of what we were paying for the hosted service,” he says. To take advantage of the deal, he began shopping for an IP phone system (an Internet-based system).
“I met with several vendors, and one of them was Craig Ray,” he says. Craig is the owner at ProTech Networks, a Cisco Select Certified Partner (a reseller that specializes in serving small businesses). Its clients have operations across the U.S..
“We brought in a Cisco SBCS to demo,” Craig says. “Jason and the staff got to hold the phones in their hands, to experience their quality. They saw for themselves how easy the system is to use, and how powerful it is.
“All in one box, it gives most small businesses everything they need.”
“I had told Craig we required a simple system that would be a long-term investment, not anything we’d be replacing anytime soon,” says Templeton. “We needed an auto-attendant and voicemail that’s easy to use. And it had to be reliable and come with responsive service.
“We got everything we asked for.”
Lower Cost, Better Technology and Service
The office’s Cisco SBCS solution includes a unified communications platform for 24 users, a switch, and 20 flagship Cisco IP Phones.
The office pays less than $600 a month to lease the solution from Cisco Capital and have ProTech Networks remotely manage it; the office will own the solution after 36 payments.
“The boss is very happy,” says Jason. “We’re saving money every month. Plus, we get more advanced technology, and better service.
“ProTech Networks responds immediately remotely, or comes onsite in just a few hours. Our old telecom vendor took 24 or 48 hours, if we were lucky.”
Simple Means More Productive
“The phone features are easy for all of us to use—no one has any complaints. We are a very busy practice, and the phones make us much more efficient.
“The time savings we get from this system have improved our level of care, and our ability to serve new patients,” he says. “We’re now seeing about 100 patients a day.”
Templeton says specific improvements include the following:
• Now every call is picked up within three rings, by staff or the auto-attendant.
• When patients or pharmacists call with an inquiry, they no longer wait on hold, and staff is not interrupted. The auto-attendant routes the call, and staff can respond in a timely way.
• With their own voicemail boxes, the medical professionals no longer work from cryptic written phone messages. “The accuracy is much higher, so we do our jobs better and faster,” he says.
“Our productivity and patient care are up, and our overhead costs are down. We are conserving cash. This was an excellent investment for us,” says Jason.

Do you have Gigabytes of information stored on your server that you’ll never use, but feel like you should keep? You are not alone. Given expanding regulatory rules and the key role that electronic records now play in law suits, some businesses go so far as to save every bit of data they have.. In fact, reports that the total amount of disk storage shipped last year grew 42.5 percent from 2008, proving that many businesses are opting to save much more of their information, rather than deleting it.

 
You may be thinking, “So why should I worry about our data storage?” or “What’s the big deal in keeping everything?” While it is true that even offsite data storage costs have gone down by about 20% this year, the simple fact is that keeping your data forever can create long-term management challenges and lead to headaches when something needs to be found. Most often companies that save everything don’t do so because they think it’s the best way, but because they aren’t sure what needs to be saved or deleted.
 
Certainly every organization needs to save information for its own purposes, such as transactions, accounting records, analytical data, and so on.  Not only that, but regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) require enterprises to save certain kinds of content for a prescribed period.  You may not be hit by these acts, but rest assured more regulations are in the works.
 
Data retention is a balancing act.  Keep too much and not only will the cost of eDiscovery in a law suit (even a frivolous one) be astronomical, but you also increase the risk of damaging findings being discovered.  On the other hand, delete data without a specific and rigorously enforced retention policy and you’re not likely to receive the benefit of the doubt with the courts as to why requested information is not available.
 
What should be done? 

To address the problem, here are 4 data retention strategies you must consider:
 
1.)    Start with the storage analysis, not the storage technology or procedures.  Know what data has to be kept and for how long.  Many times requirements are dictated by industry or legal requirements.  There are software tools to help you in analyzing what information is stored on your servers and how it’s used.

2.)     Segment user populations.  Use categories such as executives, back-office employees, sales, and people who deal with the company’s intellectual property and treat their data differently.  You certainly don’t need to keep back office transactional data as long as executive strategic communications.
3.)    Be precise and consistent with data retention policies.  Carefully crafted and enforced policies will more often than not be deemed legally defensible causing less legal exposure and dramatically lowering the cost of eDiscovery.
4.)    Don’t confuse back-up with archiving.  Since backup systems don’t generally have the granular control needed to save some types of information for a short time and others for longer, using them as archival systems can be costly and risky.  For example, if a certain business record needs to be saved for seven years, the wrong place to save it is on a backup tape with 65,000 other files.
                                  
Avoid the expense and hassle of having too much data by having and enforcing strong policies and using proper tools to maintain independent data archives.  We can assist you in identifying best practices and cost effective software tools for your business.  Contact ProTech Networks and let us help you with your precious data.