Commercial building owners and managers have justifiable reasons for seeking building riser management solutions. Inspecting the vertical riser system and telecom closets in many commercial buildings can reveal thousands of feet of aging cabling abandoned by former tenants. Abandoned cables can take up valuable space in a building's risers and create significant risks to commercial tenants, including fire safety hazards.

Abandoned cabling may not be an immediate risk to access or safety in newer commercial buildings. However, failure to identify and remove issues from the vertical riser system can create problems quickly. In 2019, the average business uses more than three times the bandwidth resources they used in 2016. The growing demand for data connectivity is fueled by installations and upgrades to communication infrastructures. 

There's no question that commercial property managers need a solution to maintain safe risers to extend communication services from the building's telco point of entry (MPoE) to the telecom closets on each floor. The market has responded to this growing need with several types of services to audit, clean up, and maintain the risers in commercial properties. There are several options for building riser management solutions, each of which offers distinct pros and cons.

Telephone Denial of Service (TDoS) attacks are on the rise, and no business is exempt from this security risk. While phone spam is not a new threat to businesses, risks to your communication systems have evolved.

Today's hackers are using sophisticated malware to infect smartphones and flood the phone systems of agencies or companies with spoofed phone calls, resulting in phone line unavailability for legitimate callers.

The growth of TDoS is so concerning, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have issued warnings to businesses about this risk. If a telephone-based DOS attack targets your organization, you may suffer consequences that are even worse than phone system downtime. TDoS attacks can be used as a "smokescreen," or distraction from other information security threats against your network. Increasingly, TDoS targets also face extortion demands to pay a ransom to stop the attack.

While the Internet Crime Complaint Center has received thousands of reports about TDoS attacks, there have only been a few convictions to date. TDoS attacks equally impact every kind of phone system, regardless of whether a business is using traditional phone technology, premises-based systems, or voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephony. To protect your brand, it’s time to determine your risk level, evaluate solutions, and create a plan for response.

Can you imagine the mess you would face if you went 23 years without cleaning out your closets? Unfortunately, that is a frightening reality for the telecom risers and phone closets in many older commercial buildings.

I was touring one building, and in one of their telco closets, there was a whole rack of equipment powered on for a telecom company that had been out of business for five years! Telecom risers play the vital role of housing data and phone communication in commercial buildings from the basement minimum point of entry (MPoE) through vertical risers to commercial tenant offices. Riser infrastructure needs to be managed by professionals to avoid the headaches caused by abandoned cabling infrastructure like fire hazards or damage.

The current state of commercial cable risers can be traced back to 1996 when the Telecommunications Act deregulated the industry. Deregulation meant better price and selection for businesses, but it also led to an influx of telco vendors who were installing cabling in commercial risers. During the same 23-year period, internet technology adoption worldwide grew over 5,944%, and business demand for data bandwidth began to soar. These factors converged into a recipe for very cluttered cabling closets.

Organizations are transferring data between environments at an unprecedented rate due to the adoption of bandwidth-hungry technologies like unified communications, big data analytics, and cloud backups. The result is a constant flow of data between on-site data centers, the cloud, branch offices, and remote workers. As traffic levels continue to skyrocket, there’s a need for IT administrators to improve the performance of their networks by allocating bandwidth and monitoring performance in real-time.

Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology is emerging as a solution to simplify network management while improving costs and performance. SD-WAN provides a user-friendly administration interface and software tools to measure network performance metrics over multiple networks continually. SD-WAN solutions automate network management by allocating resources for more excellent performance and full visibility to create efficiencies.

Adopting SD-WAN can allow organizations to dramatically simplify the complex process of network performance management with a solution that can respond to real-time network performance. As an alternative to costlier MPLS technologies or less-sophisticated WAN management, SD-WAN can offer many financial and business benefits.

If you feel your business received a high number of strange calls in the past year from telemarketers, robots or scammers, you’re probably correct. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received over 7 million complaints from businesses and consumers about suspicious phone calls and scammers. That represents a 34% annual growth in the volume of unwanted and criminal phone communications.

Cybercriminals and scammers are still relying on phone lines as a method for trying to extract money from their targets, and some of last year's most common phone scams included more IRS tax scams and fake tech support schemes. Phone risks aren’t going anywhere, and businesses are facing a new malware threat which could tie up their phone lines and smokescreen other criminal activity.

As a small business, your phone lines are a critical tool for communicating with employees and customers. If your lines are down, it can cause reputation damage to your business, even if you're the target of a threat.

An unreliable business phone system can be a very costly expense. Your employees and customers rely on voice calling technology to communicate and collaborate. If your phones go down, it will have an immediate impact on productivity, customer satisfaction, and brand reputation.

Research shows that making the switch to hosted telephony can deliver significant cost savings compared to premises-based PBX phone systems. However, the cost isn't the only factor to consider when evaluating if cloud Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) solutions are right for your needs.

Understanding the full scope of benefits made possible with modern phone systems can help you future-proof business communications.

Cloud phone systems no longer represent a high-risk investment for businesses. By the end of 2019, 90% of companies will be using cloud apps and services, and analysts predict nearly 100% of firms will adopt cloud tools by 2021. In this blog, you’ll learn seven remarkable ways that hosted telephony could transform the way your organization communicates.

“This call may be recorded for quality and training purposes.”

You've probably heard that legally required disclosure countless times when you call your bank, utility company, or other service providers. Chances are, you rarely put much thought into it. However, when your business is starting to research solutions to record business phone calls, you can't just zone out and press 0 to speak to an operator.

Many companies are surprised to learn that the right approach to consent can vary from state-to-state and that failure to follow the laws can result in steep civil penalties.

Call recording software can provide immense business value for companies of all sizes as a tool for training, customer service, and performance. Before you can unlock the benefits of call recording, it's important to understand the right way to record telephone conversations legally and ethically.

Using IP to carry voice traffic (VoIP) opens up a world of possibilities and new opportunities. Call recording is one of them. But, it's so much more than being able to make an MP3 mix of voicemails from persistent sales people. Buying a business call recording system can offer many other benefits to your business. Organizations of all sizes can use audio recordings to strengthen employee training, marketing, and customer service. Call recordings can improve record-keeping, boost regulatory compliance, and provide clarity during disputes.

With the wrong call recording solution, you may not unlock any of these benefits. Your business could face a lot of risks. You could face legal trouble if you fail to follow federal and state laws for wiretapping or recording. You could face costly regulatory fines for non-compliance with PCI, HIPAA, or other regulations. If your solution isn't interoperable or easy-to-use, you may waste a lot of money moving to a new solution.

Investing in business network performance can yield a high return on investment. Research has found that stronger network performance is associated with more profitable companies, due to cost savings, increased productivity, and lower risk. Not having to worry about the network or constantly troubleshoot it or discover bottlenecks that impede progress are result in your ability to increase the bottom line. If your organization is evaluating the best SD-WAN solutions, you’re on your way to unlocking better network availability, reliability, and reduced administration costs.

But which SD-WAN is the best? How do you know the difference between vendor marketing and solutions which will lead to superior network performance?

According to Gartner, there are over three dozen options for SD-WAN administration. The same survey found that shoppers are overwhelmed with their choices due to a lack of familiarity with the technology and skepticism about how reliably options can perform. If you feel the marketplace is confusing or crowded, you're in the majority among your IT peers. I had one CIO tell me that at a Tech Council cocktail party, he got over five different answers to the question, what is SD-WAN?

Atlantech Online is continuing to set the standard for quality fiber connectivity and service for businesses in Montgomery County, MD and the greater Washington DC metro area. Atlantech recently expanded its coverage by installing and lighting fiber that can be used for business Internet and telephone service at the Shady Grove Development Park (SGDP). The SGDP consists of the addresses 15819-15887 Gaither Drive and 9246-9298 Gaither Road in Gaithersburg, Maryland.