Mobility For Outs And Nomads = Business Continuity For Ins

With the leaves finally starting to fall from the trees our thoughts naturally turn to the winter; snow, ice, travel disruption, coughs, colds and flu! If you're working for a forward thinking organisation, there'll already be policies in place to allow you to work just as efficiently out of the office as in it, for all those occasions when it's impractical, impossible or simply just not recommended that you make it in to your normal place of work.

"We've talked at length about the three types of employee that now constitute the modern business workforce," says Robin Hayman, Director of Marketing & Product Management for SpliceCom. "Those that are always in the office, those that are always out of the office and those who spend their time both in and out of the office. We call these Ins, Outs and Nomads for the sake of brevity and clarity. The technology that now exists to enable the Outs and Nomads to work just as effectively and efficiently as the Ins, means that hot desking, homeworking, remote working and mobile working initiatives are becoming ever more commonplace, with the time differential between trials and wide scale roll out continually decreasing.

All that's needed to overcome the typical winter "downtime" business profile we've seen time and time again over the past few years is to extend these capabilities to everyone within the organisation ¯ even the Ins who would never normally venture out of the office during a normal working day.

"Mobility, in terms of business telephony and unified communications, is becoming much easier to plan, implement and support from both a business and IT perspective. Use of SSL technology makes routing IP Voice outside of the office far more secure and easier to rollout then ever before, overcoming all the issues associated with virtual private networks and firewalls. Personal web portals allow employees to control exactly where, how and on what device calls are handled. This isn't just old school call forwarding or call deflection, it allows an employee's full telephony "profile", including DDI, Departmental call participation, voicemail, speed dials and presence, to be totally portable," continues Hayman.

"Winter places exceptional planning requirements on a business, effectively turning the Ins into Nomads, as and when required. The same requirement turns the wide range of mobility and remote working offerings into a business continuity solution. Add into the mix a Soft IP PBX, with its capability of being located on-site, in the cloud or running as part of a hybrid architecture, be that on a native server or in a virtualised IT environment and you put into place the final piece of a low-cost, easy to implement & manage full Disaster Recovery programme for voice. For at least one season each year, this means that there are only Outs and Nomads," concludes Hayman.