Why MSPs risk leaving money on the table when it comes to business resilience

Thursday, 14 July 2022 15:51

By Peter Eldon, sales and marketing director, Access4

Access4 sales and marketing director Peter Eldon

GUEST OPINION: In response to the ever-evolving IT security threat landscape, many Managed Service Providers (MSPs) work closely with their clients to improve the status of their data security. They understand a successful cyberbreach can be both disruptive and damaging.

Firewalls, endpoint security tools, and backup systems are combined to create security infrastructures that improve data resilience whether that data is housed at a central headquarters or at home with remote-working staff.

However, while providing these services can be lucrative for MSPs, there is an additional revenue opportunity that is often missed. This is the chance to extend this resilience to also cover voice services.

The benefits of resilient voice services

For an MSP’s clients, the benefits of having a resilient voice capability are significant and were highlighted in the early days of the pandemic lockdowns. While a traditional office-based telephony system functions well when staff are actually in the office, its limitations quickly become evident when those staff are suddenly required to work from home.

To overcome these limitations and improve their business resilience, increasing numbers of organisations are turning to cloud-based or hosted telephony and contact centre alternatives that can be delivered ‘as-a-service’.

Incoming calls can be routed to staff regardless of their location and transferred to other people as required. No expensive and complex equipment is needed in the organisation’s data centre which eliminates the need for expensive localised management.

Making use of a hosted voice solution also means that smaller organisations can gain access to sophisticated features that were once only available to those at the big end of town. Call management and analytics that can significantly improve the experience for customers can now be put in the hands of staff at even small firms.

Improved security

MSPs can make the prospect of shifting to a hosted voice solution even more attractive to their clients by outlining the significant improvements the change will also make when it comes to their level of IT security.

With voice increasingly just a stream of data across a network, the underlying servers that support an organisation’s telephony system can be just as attractive to cybercriminals as data or application servers.

For this reason, it is important to select a voice or Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) vendor that has effective security measures built into their platform. Failure to do this could result in an organisation suffering an attack and losing access to their voice communication resources.

In some cases, there have been reports of IP telephony systems being hacked and incoming calls routed to other numbers. An attacker could also choose to prevent outgoing calls or steal customer data from other systems connected to the voice infrastructure.

The importance of due diligence

Just as an organisation should carefully assess a technology partner who might assist them with hosted data resources, the same steps should be taken to evaluate a potential hosted voice vendor.

It’s important to query prospective voice and UCaaS providers about the security measures they have in place and how these are monitored and maintained. Assess whether they have the ability to keep abreast of the changing threat landscape and take the steps required to ensure their platform is fully secure.

MSPs that can offer resilient voice alongside data services to their clients will open up a significant new potential revenue stream. With the likelihood of remote working remaining a feature of the business landscape for some time, organisations will be looking for ways to ensure long-term resilience.

Consider what a difference adding resilient voice capabilities to your service offering would make to your operations.

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Why MSPs risk leaving money on the table when it comes to business resilience