How our free technology and comms audit can help

Connectivity

The natural place to start is by checking your business’s connectivity. None of the services that support your business work at their best without reliable access to the internet. We’ll ensure that your broadband service can keep supporting you moving forward.

If you’re working with an outdated ADSL or FTTC connection, we may recommend an upgrade. Cost-effective SoGEA and superfast FTTP are now available across much of the country, and provide a significant, and future-proof, step up.

For businesses with enterprise-level connectivity needs, we will always recommend our leased lines. These offer unbeatable speeds and reliability. 

First, it’s crucial to understand just how important the internet is for your business, specifically how long you can last without it. If it is critical, we’ll recommend a business-grade service with SLAs included, as well as a comprehensive resiliency plan.

Infrastructure

Once we understand the connection required to support your business, we’ll look at the condition, performance and security of your critical infrastructure. This includes everything from physical hardware including your Wi-Fi and cybersecurity.

Step one is all about your data cabinets and infrastructure cabling. We’ll ensure your cabinets and their contents are labelled, neat and secure. We’ll also check the cabling around the office, whether it’s cat5, cat6 or cat6a, to make sure it’s installed and terminated to the correct standard. Poor infrastructure is often the cause of inefficiencies and downtime, we’ll ensure they don’t let you down.

Next, we’ll review your routers/firewalls as well as your switches as these not only protect your network they are critical in day to day business operations and require regular management to work at their best. We’ll always work to understand how you do this currently and how we can improve it. Routers/firewalls and switches have to provide a consistent level of security and have to be able to cope with the internet speeds you have access to.

Finally, we’ll take a look at your Wi-Fi. Different businesses will have wildly different requirements here. We’ll always ensure that you have full coverage on-site, without any black spots where you cannot access a reliable signal. We’ll also aim to understand whether your access points are kept up to date, and by whom and what levels of security are in place.

Servers

The resources a business has in their IT team can massively vary and even larger businesses with an in-house team can struggle to maintain all their servers and backups. Part of our audit process is checking behind the scenes to make sure that these are working at their best.

This starts with server hardware. Every physical device within your server estate has to be up to date, have enough capacity to support your business’s needs, and perform up to the required standard. Next, we’ll check that your operating system is in date as well. The devastating 2017 WannaCry attack against the NHS was caused by an outdated OS, so its importance really can’t be overstated.

Once we understand your server hardware, we’ll take a more in-depth look at your software and configuration. Servers may have been set up in a way that was beneficial at the time, but no longer offers your business the best support and/or performance. We’ll look for better options.

Last but no means least is security. We’ll assess your anti-virus and malware protection, as well as the measures you’ve got in place in the event something does go wrong. We’ll help you manage and keep your security up to date, as well as designing a disaster recovery strategy to get you back online if something does go wrong.

Endpoints

Once we’ve understood the services that support your team’s day-to-day operations, the next step is to look at the devices themselves. Especially with the rise of remote working, the PCs, laptops and other endpoints your team use can potentially cause inefficiency or security risks.

As part of the audit process, we’ll first check the hardware itself. How old are your devices? Can they effectively run the software that you use every day? Will they have the capacity to store all the files you need? We’ll also check that the software you have in place adequately supports your business needs, or if there are better options available.

It’s not just the devices itself that we’ll review. We also care about the processes that your IT team go through. It’s important to ensure that the setup and support process is done to industry standards, but also carried out in a way that’s easy for your team and doesn’t create new pain points.

Finally, we’ll check your patch management process, ensuring that both the software, and security services you use are kept up to date. We’ll once again check whether a disaster recovery process has been implemented. With business mobiles at an all-time high in terms of popularity, ensuring that you have the correct MDM software to protect them is also crucial.

Telecoms

Communications is how it all started here at Pure Cloud. We’re in a fantastic position to support businesses with their telecoms, from on-premise and cloud solutions to business mobiles and new UC applications. We’ll start our telecoms audit by reviewing your existing technology. We’ll get to know the age and performance of your solution, and any pain points you experience when using it.

We’ll then apply a similar process to your business mobile tariffs. Many businesses struggle to find a deal that accommodates their needs without overspending. This is where we can help. We have great relationships with the major UK providers, allowing us to find a deal that offers you a great price and full coverage.

Finally, we’ve worked with many teams recently who have benefitted from augmenting their communications with a UC platform. This service allows you to work at your best, by accessing your phone system features and contacts, anytime from anywhere.

Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity

Our audit process is not just designed to support your business now, but give you the resources to keep you working at your best for years to come. The perfect example of this is our business continuity plans.

Even cloud services like Microsoft 365 and G Suite are not backed up automatically. This means outages could cause data loss and downtime for your business. It’s not just backups that we look at either. We also put in a plan and recommend the correct products and services to ensure that if there is an outage, we can bring everything back online quickly.

Finally, we’ll check that your connection has a backup. You should have a resilient plan in place, as well as the option to move your business to a 4/5G connection if your internet drops out.

Get in touch to book your consultation today. We’re happy to run through the whole process or just have a friendly, no-obligation chat about how we can support your business. You can reach us here at Pure Cloud on 0333 150 6780.