A herd of elephants is wandering round boardrooms throughout America. They go by the names “Regulatory Compliance” “Safety,” and “Reliability,” and also you ignore them at your individual peril. And since they’re troublesome to cope with, tons ofbusiness telephone service suppliers and unified communications distributors don’t need to speak about them. Neither do most hostedcall middle softwareproviders, though lots of their prospects deal with delicate buyer info over their communications channels.

10 Inquiries to Draw Out the Elephants within the Room

Listed here are ten inquiries to ask suppliers of any unified communications providers, together with enterprise telephone service, faxing, Net conferences and videoconferencing, and hosted name middle software program. They’re designed to start out conversations about what your supplier in all probability needs you wouldn’t convey up.

1. Are you able to advocate explicit configurations of our system to assist us comply? Suppliers of enterprise telephone service and unified communications that make compliance a precedence can typically provide you with experience or ideas that will help you comply, and so they’re extra more likely to have a compliance officer who can clarify how their providers are set as much as facilitate compliance.

1. Are you a HIPAA-compliant enterprise affiliate? In that case, can you set it in writing? Many firms aren’t, and doing enterprise with them may jeopardize your compliance if you happen to use their providers.

1. What has your communications firm performed to make sure compliance? For telecommunications suppliers, compliance is an in depth, ongoing course of. First, they need to make sure that their firm complies. And in lots of circumstances, they should confirm that their very own chain of third events can be compliant with the most recent HIPAA enterprise affiliate and different regulatory necessities. And they should have signed Enterprise Affiliate and different agreements. Solely then can they provide HIPAA compliant unified communications providers.

1. Do you might have a devoted safety and compliance officer? eight×eight does. (That will be me. As you’ll be able to see from my bio, I’m keen about safety, reliability and compliance.)

1. Which safety and compliance metrics do you help?Suppliers ought to meet HIPAA, FISMA and FIPS compliance specs. eight×eight is the one well-known enterprise VoIP supplier that gives optionally available FISMA (average) and FIPS-2 (Degree 2) data-in-motion and data-at-rest encryption.

1. Has your compliance been assessed by unbiased specialists? In that case, who did the evaluation? Search for precise third-party verification by revered specialists, so that you just don’t jeopardize your individual firm’s compliance. Salespeople are sometimes confused in regards to the new guidelines themselves, and will mislead you, so ask for unbiased affirmation.

1. What reliability degree are you able to help? The very last thing you want is in your name middle software program to be unavailable, or for your small business telephone service to go down. Ask for at the very least “4 nines.” (eight×eight has achieved 99.997% common uptime in 2013.)

1. What sort of failover capabilities does your service present? It’s a good observe to have failover between a number of datacenters. eight×eight gives seamless failover functionality for eight×eight telephones. eight×eight additionally makes use of georouting to have the endpoints registered to the closest information middle, for a high-quality consumer expertise. Within the occasion of a difficulty with the info middle, telephones would routinely and seamlessly fail over to the subsequent closest information middle. eight×eight has two information facilities within the US, one in Hong Kong, and one within the UK, which helps to make sure eight×eight unified communications reliability.

1. What strategies does your service supplier supply for enterprise continuity? When pure disasters or outages strike, you need to have the ability to preserve going, so search for service with a number of methods to remain related. As a result of eight×eight enterprise telephone service and Digital Contact Middle can be found by pc with any browser, calls might be forwarded to cell telephones or different websites, and might be moved by transporting your IP telephone to another web site with an Web connection. As well as, your eight×eight enterprise telephone service can run on workers’ private smartphones utilizing the eight×eight downloadable cellular app. A number of of our prospects have even used Digital Contact Middle—our hosted name middle software program—to maintain answering telephones after Hurricane Sandy and different pure disasters.

1. What sort of buyer references are you able to present? And what do they are saying about your means and willingness to work with any particular wants your group has? If a supplier’s references gained’t speak in regards to the supplier’s means to offer safety, reliability and compliance, that’s virtually as massive a pink flag as unwillingness to deal with the problem. eight×eight’s clientele contains air ambulance providers, airports, insurance coverage firms, authorized corporations, and name middle software program customers, which all have necessary necessities that eight×eight meets or exceeds. For instance, the EPA even makes use of our hosted name middle software program to reply residents’ questions in regards to the security of their water. See the eight×eight web site and weblog.eight×eight.com for buyer testimonials.

What Else Are They Not Telling You?

The way you run your group is your small business, however you actually shouldn’t accept any enterprise telephone service or unified communications supplier who gained’t provide you with full solutions. The identical goes for hosted name middle software program. As a result of if they will’t be trustworthy about one thing as apparent as safety, reliability and compliance, that has to make you marvel what else they’re not telling you.

And if you happen to’re on the lookout for straight speak about safety, reliability and compliance, take a look at this white paper, “The Elephant Herd within the Room,” which additionally contains the above guidelines of ten “dialog starter” inquiries to ask your small business telephone service supplier, unified communications firm or name middle software program vendor

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or name us @ 310-213-1609