Many law firms are facing rapidly growing data storage needs. Data storage needs for many mid-sized law firms have grown to one, two, or even five terabytes of data. Data storage for law firms include  data pertaining to litigation, documents, email, application related data, and databases.

As a consequence of this data growth, many IT teams are struggling with the burden of managing backups, off-site replication, and all the associated systems.  Therefore, IT folks at many law firms are asking themselves: “How can I get out of the file server business?” It’s a system that requires a lot of work, a lot duplicate data, a lot of migration and a lot of headaches for many law firms.

While data growth is a concern, law firms are also evaluating their business continuity strategies in the event of a major disaster (either natural disaster or human error). IT teams are determining the maximum amount of time an outage can be tolerated with no access to the company data or email? What is the desired recovery time?

In a previous post I outlined potential problem areas with traditional data recovery methods which could take anywhere between several hours to several days. It is unacceptable for law firms to be “offline” for hours or even days. The cost of lost time and productivity quickly grows to several thousands of dollars.

Let’s explore briefly some available options to address rapid data growth:

With a  traditional approach to data storage, law firms have their most important data on file servers or on storage arrays as part of their SAN, and that’s data that always needs to be accessible. If the data can not be accessed then the firms lose money. Many law firms have built out an infrastructure to protect that data set where they send data to tape or different types of disk, they may send it across town to an entire different building in case of a disaster. If firms need to manage  more data sets, then they purchase new storage equipment. For example,  the firms’ vendors would deliver and install the additional hardware and disk drives,  and future storage devices, shelf space, and consultation would come at an additional cost. Vendors would include data storage management companies as well as companies offering infrastructure virtualization services. However, some of these options often entail major outlays of capital expense which can be challenging during this current slow economic recovery.

Therefore, cost pressures have led some firms to explore cloud-based technologies such cloud storage services and cloud storage gateways.  Instead of a law firms buying and maintaining their own storage hardware,  firms pay a monthly or annual subscription fee which in many cases provides firms with more manageable operating expenses.

The 2011 American Lawyer’s annual law firm technology survey shows that 63% of law firms say that they are using some type of cloud-based solution. Cloud storage providers and cloud storage gateway services are among the most promising data storage solutions for law firms because of the large economies of scale they can offer.

The same survey also discovers that 77% of law firm respondents who have used cloud services describe their cloud computing experience as positive. When asked “What have been the biggest benefits of cloud computing?”, 80%
of firms answer that the biggest benefits are simplified support and maintenance.

So, what’s keeping law firms from flocking to cloud storage providers to solve their growing data storage requirements? Security and data control are the  greatest concerns preventing law firms from adopting cloud storage.

While firms are acknowledging  the efficiencies of the cloud storage technologies they are taking a careful look at how and where their data is stored and which security measures are necessary to protect that data.

Addressing Security Concerns

Cloud storage solutions are not a risky place to store sensitive data and many law firms are implementing cloud storage and backup services .  The first step when exploring cloud storage is understanding the underlying security concerns.

End to end encryption

Data should be encrypted before it leaves the four walls of your data center. No data should leave a law firm’s computer room or data center without encryption and no one at the cloud storage facility should be able to read any of your data.

SSL for secure connections

All cloud storage offerings rely on a secure connection while the data is in transit, this system provides an additional layer of security.

Cloud credentials

With a firm’s own credentials, a firm assures that only authorized personal have access to data, and data will remain separate from any other data. Only authorized members of a law firm’s staff will have access to the data.

Backup and recovery

In conclusion, cloud storage and cloud storage gateways also have a built-in backup component as the data is replicated across multiple data centers and regions within the provider’s data center infrastructure.  In the event of a disaster resulting in data loss at a law firm’s business location, data recovery times and access to critical data is  often accomplished within 30 minutes or less. These RTOs (recovery time objectives) are backed by strong SLAs (services level agreements).

I work with several data continuity providers, feel free to contact me for a complimentary cloud storage technology assessment for your firm.

During the video blog I talk about cloud storage gateways and cloud storage providers, at one point I use these terms interchangeably. Therefore, let me clarify:

1. A cloud storage gateway is a software package, virtual appliance, or NAS server (with a cloud component embedded) which sits at your business locations. It is not the public cloud itself.
2. A cloud storage provider is typically the public data center such as Amazon S3 or Microsoft.

Hope you enjoy the video blog and please feel free to contact me if I can assist your business in developing a cloud storage strategy.

How To Choose A Cloud Storage Gateway

Potential Problems With Conventional File Storage and Disaster Recovery Plans

Many businesses I work with have the following file storage scenario: A number of users or clients are attached to host computers. The users’ data sits on a primary storage device and is backed up to a backup server and copied to disk or copied to tape which is then taken to a second site to prepare for a disaster recovery. Depending on your needs and budget, this backup might happen continuously or on a daily basis. In other words, a copy of your data is at a different location.

In the event of a major infrastructure failure at your primary location, all users would loose access to their data. Now you need to get access to the data at the other location which in some cases is a second data center which the customer has established. Beside the high cost of running a second data center or a backup location, you have to connect all your users to that secondary site across your WAN (wide are network) which could be cumbersome and time consuming. If your organization does not have some type of data connection to a secondary site in place, then you need to get the backup tapes yourself or have them delivered to your business location. Traditional restoration methods can take several hours or even days. The cost of not having access to that data goes up quickly. Just take the average salary and multiply it by the number of users who depend on your network infrastructure and you can quickly get a sense of how much the lost time and productivity will cost your business.

Considerations To Protect Your Data

Business Continuity: How long can you afford to be offline? Recent Gartner Group studies estimate that the cost of downtime  is approximately $15,000/hour for small and mid sized businesses and over $40,000/hour for larger businesses. Is that acceptable to your business or organization?

Data Integrity: Is there a chance that the data could be corrupt or changed as you back it up to a second site?  If you are backing up to tape, then a word of caution is in order, many restorations from tape are less than 100% successful. Again, a Gartner Group study demonstrates that 10-50% of all tape restores fail, and one third of businesses who back up to tape drives never test restoration from tape. Clearly, you need to be sure and test that your data restore is 100% successful as you prepare for disaster. Also consider how often you are sending the data to that second site – once a week is not often enough in today’s data driven business environment.

Cost: How much will it cost to prepare for disaster recovery? The cost of a data continuity service is typically a fraction of what it would cost to loose that data entirely.

Security: Remember, you are sending your data off-site whether it  is sent via a WAN connection to a secondary location, or you are taking tapes to your home office once a week. You must ensure that your data is encrypted when it leaves the four walls of your primary data center or business location. If you have HR records, medical records, customer information, or other types of sensitive information – you could open your business to a significant liability if the data is not properly secured and encrypted. The data needs to be encrypted BEFORE it leaves your business location.

Simplicity: Some businesses set up a backup system that is so complex that it becomes brittle the moment it is tested and it fails at several different points. For examples, loading tape after tape is cumbersome when restoring data. The backup and restore process should be simple and straight forward.

Cloud Storage: Some of the providers I partner with are offering cloud storage at the back end of their data storage solutions. Specifically, all the security and encryption happens at the customer location before the data leaves the building through sophisticated storage controllers. However, businesses are using the virtually unlimited storage capability of the cloud providers to store their data. Additionally, cloud storage services offer unlimited versions of the data across multiple data centers throughout the country. In essence, this brings the cloud storage capabilities right into your data center at a significant cost reduction when compared with traditional data storage options. Cloud storage helps free up disc space at your business location while offering secure and unlimited backup. Most importantly, your data is 100% available, accessible, and secure – all backed by a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

There are affordable data continuity services which provide ease of use, 100% reliability and security, and complete system restore times of 15 minutes after a disaster, backed by a strong Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Feel free to contact me to assist your business or organization with developing a data continuity strategy.

Lets begin with a brief definition of IPSec: IPSec is a term used to describe a set of standards for implementing and managing encryption in an IP network (e.g. Internet, MPLS). What this means is that we can provide secure communications between computers, firewalls and gateway. When we implement IPSec we create a VPN or Virtual Private Network.

Premise Based VPNs:

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are private networks which only look like they are private networks, hence the term virtual. In fact, IP packets from many other customers are running over the same lines which your business may be using as well. IPSec is used to create this virtual private network through encryption and encryption key management. The way a business might implement this technology is through equipment that is located at a customer’s premise. What this would mean is that a business could communicate and do business over the Internet for example, and it could do so in secure manner. IPSec could be implemented through software or hardware. The VPN hardware or software which is located at the customer’s data center (computer or phone room) will send the encrypted IP packets across the Internet and find its destination (a second location) where VPN hardware or software will intercept the IP packets and pass it along to the safe network location on the other end. The other end could be a remote company location or even a customer location. This is also referred to as tunneling because IP packets are hidden with another packet during this process. In other words, a VPN uses IPSec techniques to encrypt the packet that is hidden inside another packet while the data travels over the network. This system protects your data and makes it private. Many of the IT vendors I work with like to use hardware because it provides better performance, but software may also be used. Using software is very useful for people that are traveling and need to connect securely to a corporate network with their laptops over the Internet. This method of connecting to a corporate network has replaced dial-up modems over POTS lines or ISDN lines which are rarely used anymore, at least I have not seen it for some time.

Carrier VPNs:

Every telephone company (Paetec, Earthlink Business, Level3, etc.) offers VPNs as a network service. In principle, it’s exactly the same as the VPN businesses implement themselves. The main difference is that the carriers install the VPN equipment and offer it as a service to businesses and organizations. This means that as a business you don’t have to decide on which encryption method to use, which hardware to buy, managing encryption keys – the carriers or telephone companies would do all this for you. The carrier VPN service delivers an IP packet network that has guaranteed security and confidentiality built in and these guarantees are also outlined in a service level agreement (SLA) provided by the carrier or telephone company. Whether or not Quality of Service (QoS) is included is actually a different question and a feature that can be added to the service. QoS plays a critical role in VoIP and I have written about it in a previous post entitled “Comparing VoIP over MPLS with VoIP over the public Internet” A carrier VPN gives us primarily secure communications over an IP network. An MPLS VPN is an example of a carrier VPN which businesses can lease from a telephone company. Incidentally, MPLS has replaced older technologies such as frame relay and ATM as the preferred choice for wide area networks. MPLS networks are maintained by the carrier who provides guaranteed performance parameter. Specific performance parameters can not be guaranteed over the Internet.

When deciding which type of VPN your business requires it is important to establish what your telecommunications and technology objectives are. Are your network needs part of a business continuity plan? Do you need to improve communications among multiple sites? Do you need to improve voice quality over a wide area network (WAN)? Does your organization need to meet certain compliance requirements?

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We just experienced a historical October snow storm in the North East which collapsed the regional electric grid for days. Many businesses were “offline” for days. The question arises, how long can your business afford to be “offline” before significant dollar amounts are lost? How many orders are you not receiving? How many billings are you not
activating? What happens to your business when you are down for several hours, a whole day, or several days? Secondly, how much would it cost to have a contingency plan in place?

If your business has no business continuity plan in place, the following overview of available business continuity products, services, and solutions should provide you with a good starting point.

What specifically is required to keep the business running in case of a disaster?

The primary objective when developing a disaster recovery plan is to take an inventory of critical business functions. This means examining system backups and alternative data and call paths. Secondly, if a disaster (human error or natural disaster) effects your business then how do you restore services quickly or ensure uninterrupted business
functions? First, I’d like to propose a basic step by step business continuity assessment guide:

1. Take an inventory of both your data and voice network infrastructure e.g. servers, phone systems, data, applications, routers, etc.
2. Design a business continuity solution: Communicate with all departments in your business to be sure that all aspects of the business are covered with respect to your technology needs.
3. Research telecommunications and data providers who can assist in designing a solution with appropriate product sets and technologies. Establish which services are most critical and what are the associated costs.
4. Implement your solution.
5. Test, Test, Test: You must test your business continuity plan. For example, if you are having your calls re-routed to another phone number or locations then test the fail-over service with your service provider. If you are using a cloud data storage service then make sure that your data can be restored easily and quickly.

In the next section, I will provide a broad overview of available products and services which help ensure that your technology infrastructure continues to work.

Automatic Voice Fail-Over: If your host or main location has lost phone service because of a major power outage, you could have your calls automatically rerouted to any other phone number. That would include cell phones, a secondary location, a toll free number, or an answering service. Many of the providers I work with offer this
ability.

VoIP/POTS Service: Traditional POTS (Plain Ordinary Telephone Service) which is offered by your local telephone company may be interrupted during a snow storm, however, your cable connection may still operate. You could provision a VoIP phone service over the existing cable connection. This setup would enable you to make and receive phone calls while the primary POTS service in being repaired.

3G Wireless: If both cable and POTS service to one or more of your locations is down (this is rare but could happen) then you may want to consider connecting over the air e.g.  3G/4G or even MPLS 3G. You could utilize the 3G or 4G connection for both voice and data services.

MPLS: If your business has multiple locations, an MPLS network provides an inherent recovery solution because of its fully meshed network infrastructure. MPLS routing capabilities would automatically reroute your data and voice traffic to another path in the event of an outage.

Data Backup and Recovery: During a network failure, whether natural disaster or human error, consider storing your data off-site in a secure and encrypted data storage facility. There are many options available for data storage through cloud storage providers. Make sure that your data is encrypted end to end and that your data is easily
restored from any location you choose.

This post should provide your business with a good starting point in developing your business continuity plan, feel free to contact me if you require assistance in evaluating technologies and provider options.

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Almost all service providers (Earthlink Business, Paetec Communications, AT&T, Verizon, Level3, etc) have implemented MPLS technologies into their core networks. Today, MPLS networks are firmly in place and carriers are aggressively marketing the benefits of MPLS by claiming significant improvements in performance, security, and availability when compared with using the public Internet. Specifically, carriers point to the superior quality when phone calls are being made over an MPLS network vs phone calls over the public Internet. In this post, I would like to examine the call quality for VoIP over MPLS compared with VoIP over the public Internet.

Does MPLS offer improved performance over the public Internet for VoIP?

The question whether to choose MPLS or the public Internet to support the voice communications for your entire organization is not one to be taken lightly. However, there are two main advantages we have when using VoIP over MPLS vs VoIP over the public Internet: When deploying an MPLS network for your company, you get traffic management and most importantly QoS, Quality of Service. What that means is that we can prioritize traffic!

For example, if we have email and voice calls happening between two or three locations, the voice IP packets and the data IP packets will have different labels and they can be assigned different priorities. In other words, we can assign a higher priority to voice calls than email traffic. This prioritization occurs throughout the entire MPLS network, not only in your routing and switching equipment.

Because we can manage and prioritize traffic on the MPLS network, the voice or data packets can be routed over the MPLS network much faster and more efficiently which leads to superior call quality. Voice prioritization is not possible for the public internet. When IP packets travel over the Internet there is no guaranteed call quality.

Delay and Jitter

Delay means how long it takes of what is being said on one end of the conversation to arrive at the the other end of the conversation. What is the delay of time? Delays can occur within the network and within the equipment, or delay can occur because of line and circuit quality. Therefore, in addition to traffic management and prioritization, most MPLS business location choose a T1 to connect to the MPLS network. One of the primary reasons businesses choose a T1 over a cable or DSL connection is because a T1 circuit is a dedicated connection. A cable Internet or DSL connection is part of a shared network, in other words, the path of your cable connection is being shared with your cable company’s  customers which are located in close proximity to your business location. A shared network leads to delays during times of network congestion which can compromise the call quality.

A T1 connection to a carrier’s MPLS network provides you with a dedicated end to end connection with guaranteed performance levels for VoIP solutions.

Let’s review some additional purchase considerations:

Security: MPLS is an inherently private and secure network using tags and labels to identify traffic. However, when using the public Internet, typically, IPSec is used when sending traffic. IPSec carries a price premium because it requires specific hardware encryption configurations at each location when deploying a multi-location network throughout your organization.

Remote locations & QoS (Quality of Service): IPSec VPN tunnels over the Internet allows your business access to the corporate VPN from remote locations. IPSec encryption is typically the preferred method in the industry to make sure that your data, voice, and video traffic is secure.
However, the downside of IPSec over the Internet is that is does not provide data and voice prioritization. Because there is no voice prioritization over the public Internet (as mentioned above) it means that call quality can be compromised during certain times of the day. While most calls are of adequate quality, there is no guaranteed voice quality  over the Internet.   Voice prioritization is essential in the VoIP domain for many businesses and organizations, preventing clipping and distortion. MPLS offers superior voice quality through voice prioritization Quality of Service (QoS). QoS basically means that the network will provide a guaranteed level of service all of the time at all locations.

Hard and Soft Costs: The cost of circuits and equipment are easy to calculate, but what’s not as easy to calculate are soft costs such as IT resources, performance, and reliability of the network. Businesses are looking for technologies to keep at the cutting edge of their field in terms of efficiencies. MPLS provides embedded intelligence and monitoring which only requires minimal human intervention. VoIP over the public Internet does not offer that sort of network intelligence and relies on IT resources to much larger degree. IT resources are much better utilized in a creative capacity that involves the exploration and deployment of time-saving and cost reducing communication technologies.

While Internet VPNs have some desirable characteristics such as the lower monthly cost (in many cases), MPLS provides the most cost effective and efficient VPN and VoIP solution.

If I can assist your organization or business with more discussion details, please do not hesitate to contact me.

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If you have shopped for a conference call provider then you will have come across both free and paid service offerings. The question you might ask yourself is, “Why pay for conference calling when the free service seems just fine?”  What’s better than free, right?

The answer is really determined by the level of customer service, functionality, scalability, and reliability you require for your conference calling needs.

Functionality

Most of the free conference call  providers do not offer toll free dial-in numbers for call participants. Instead, you receive a local dial-in number which means the caller will be charged for the call. If the call participants happen to be local to those dial-in numbers then the call could still be free if the business has an unlimited free local calling plan or a flat rate long distance plan. However, most of the time the conference call will be a toll call. In other words, with free conference calling most call participants would actually have to pay for the call itself. Paid conference call services typically offer  toll free numbers as dial in numbers, all call participants would call in for free.

Included with most paid conference call services are complimentary web conferencing functions which would allow you to share slide show presentations. In fact, paid services offer a host of advance features (many of them for an additional charge) such as webinar functionality and video conferencing which may be quite critical to a productive conferencing event. Free conference call services typically do not offer any features beyond basic audio conferencing.

One of the most popular features of paid conference call providers is reservation-less call scheduling. There is no need to make a reservation for the conference event as most of the larger providers guarantee sufficient call capacity at any given time. You could literally email or text an invitation with a toll free dial-in number and a pass-code and instantly schedule a conference call. There is also no call time limit with a paid service provider. Free conference call providers require that you make a reservation for any conference call to ensure adequate call capacity; the call duration is also limited.

Scalability

Many free conference calling services have a limit as to how many callers may participate in a conference call. While paid conference calling providers will allow you to add hundreds or even thousands of callers to your conference call event. Large corporate clients may require the ability to add thousands of callers for regular  investor relationship updates and important product announcements. On the other hand, free conference call services should be adequate for much smaller conference call gatherings.

Reliability

I have observed call quality differences between free and paid conference call services, e.g. echoes and poor automatic gain control (automatic gain control means  that the conferencing service has the ability to automatically adjust audio volume levels of each caller.) Paid conference call providers that have invested in state of the art conference calling technology tend to have excellent call quality which may be critical to your business with regard to projecting a professional business image.

Customer Service

Paid conference call services offer live customer service assistance. For example, if you have scheduled a large conference call meeting with several dozen of your employees or clients and you require assistance with a feature such as recording a conference call for later download, or you need some sort of technical assistance, then paid conference call providers will work well for you. Large conference call providers will have customer service staff available 24/7 to provide you with a skilled customer service person. Whether you are scheduling a domestic call during standard business hours or an international call during early morning or late evening hours, paid conference call providers will have live customer service staff available at all times. However, if your conference call requirements are fairly simple audio calls with a small number of participants then the free conference call services will most likely work well for you. Keep in mind that free conference call providers usually do not have live customer service staff available during any time of day.

Getting clarification on your conference call needs and goals will help you when deciding which type of conference call provider will serve your business in the most productive and efficient manner.

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There has always been some confusion with regard to choosing between a cable Internet connection and a T1 Internet connection. Both Internet delivery methods have their place among businesses and it is my goal to provide some clarity as to which type of connection would be most suitable for your business.

When businesses evaluate Internet connectivity options it is not unusual for customers to mentally categorize Internet services in the following order (slowest to fastest) – “Dial-Up, DSL, cable, T1 line, T3 line”.  Clients also report to me that when they use their home cable connection and download a large file it is faster than their Internet connection at work; while their work place is actually using a T1 line. Is cable faster or is a T1 faster? Should speed and bandwidth be the primary considerations when choosing a business Internet connection?

Let’s begin with some basic speed comparisons:

Single T1 Line = 1.544 Mbps

Bonded T1 Line (2 or more T1 lines) = 3 Mbps – 12Mbps (some service providers will offer even higher speeds)

Cable speed =  5 Mbps – 20Mbps (some service providers will offer even higher download speeds)

The T1 line (or T1 circuit)  is a fully digital signal which provides the same speed for uploads and downloads, also referred to as a symmetrical signal. If you were to lease a 9 Mbps bonded T1 then you would have 9 Mbps for both your upload and your download speed. On the other hand, cable Internet connections are typically asymmetrical, meaning the download speeds are significantly faster than the upload speeds. Cable upload speeds are on average up to 2Mbps, although I have seen cable upload speeds as high as 5Mbps, but many are below 2Mbps.

It would appear that cable and T1 connections can be similar in speed with the exception of the upload speeds. And if you have done some cost comparison, then you will quickly learn that the monthly cost for a T1 circuit is much higher than the monthly cost for a cable connection.

You may ask yourself  “If  a T1 circuit and a cable connection can be delivered with similar download speeds, then why wouldn’t I go with the cable Internet connection strictly based on cost?”

One of the most attractive aspects of cable Internet connections is in fact the lower monthly cost when compared with T1 line costs. While the upload speeds are generally much slower than the download speeds, cable connections perform very well when latency* or ping rates** are not of major importance. If your business needs to transfer large files on a frequent basis then cable connections are an affordable and reliable connection to accomplish those tasks.

One of the primary reasons businesses choose a T1 over a cable Internet connection is because a T1 circuit is a dedicated connection. The T1 line is not shared and does not run on a shared network platform. A cable Internet connection is part of a shared network, in other words, the path of your cable connection is being shared with your cable company’s business customers which are located in close proximity to your business.Your cable connection can experience network congestion (slow Internet connections) if there is a lot of Internet traffic during certain times of day. This can be problematic if your Internet connection depends on guaranteed performance levels where any traffic congestion is unacceptable; medical and financial organizations fall into this category. T1 circuit providers also offer a 99.9% up-time guarantee through a service level agreement (SLA) which cable providers generally do not offer. Additionally,  T1 circuits are fully digital circuits which are engineered to very strict T1 carrier engineering standards to guarantee high performance levels.  A cable connection typically starts out as analog and is then encoded to provide you with a digital signal. The encoding process can lead to lower performance levels which would slow down the  Internet connection.

Steve M. works for an IT company and he trains his customers on new technology and software products. He used to travel on average 90 days a year. His days and weeks were filled with rides to the airport, air travel delays, standing in line for car rentals, checking into hotels, and then finally meeting his training attendees to begin the training sessions. Then the next day it was off to another city going through the same routine. Once he returned to the office he could expect dozens of follow up emails and phone calls from his training attendees.

Well, I’d like to propose another option in lieu of onsite training sessions. While this alternative method may not be for everyone, it certainly has worked very well for many other clients. Why not organize the training session via the web?  In fact, several of the national conferencing providers allow you to present a training seminar either live or via a prerecorded stream. The training session can be archived and played back whenever you have the need to run another training session. Additionally, during  real-time training seminars or events you may receive polling and feedback information. In other words, you can have  a collaborative give and take environment very similar to being in the same room with the attendees. Most solutions are scalable, so it does not matter if you have 5 attendees or several hundred attendees, and it can all be done without the constraint of physical boundaries. These training and event conferencing services are typically provided as a SaaS (software as a service) web-casting and webinar solution which means you can use the service without investing in expensive IT resources.

In conclusion, if your business is looking to cut costs in a soft economy then webcasting, virtual events, and conference services will certainly facilitate that goal.

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If you are setting up a conference bridge for a relatively small number of participants (2-5 callers), then most phone systems will work quite well; your phone system and the number of incoming business lines should be able to handle the conference call just fine.

However, if you have a large number of call participants, 5-20 callers, or even much more, then a conference call service provider will prove to be a more suitable solution. Many smaller PBX systems have a limited capacity as to how many conference call participants may be added to a conference bridge; and furthermore there is little caller control within the PBX system. For example, in most cases the moderator must call each caller and connect them to the conference bridge, not to mention that the conference call would be using up your available business lines  – callers could potentially get busy signals if your incoming business lines are unavailable due to a high number conference call participants.

In many cases, a conference call provider is a better option because they offer higher call quality and control over the conference call. For example, with a conference call service you provide your callers with centralized access. In other words, each caller may dial into the conference bridge and join the conference call through a preassigned pass code. Many of the large conference call providers allow reservation-less call setup, and they provide their clients with enough call capacity which enables their clients to establish a conference call at a moment’s notice. In most cases, all that is required is to have the call initiator or moderator send out an email or text to all participants with the necessary call-in information and the conference bridge can be established almost instantly.

Finally, conference call services provide automatic gain control. Automatic gain control means  that the conferencing service has the capability to automatically adjust audio volume levels of each caller. One of the most frequent complaints when calls are established with a fairly large number of participants using a phone system is the uneven volume level of the various callers. Automatic audio gain control eliminates that problem entirely and contributes to a more productive and pleasant conference call experience.

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