As many of you know by now, Sangoma has purchased NetFortris, and now we have added some new “Managed Services” offerings. What are managed services? It’s no surprise that IT is getting more and more complex. As an IT manager, you have cybersecurity concerns; there are many ways to get connectivity. Your company wants to run all kinds of cloud applications, and now it’s even hard to get the required hardware you need.
As an SMB or even medium-sized business, it’s hard to keep up. Add onto that you may have outdated/old systems that you constantly have to keep adding “patches” on. And add onto that the ability (or inability) to get enough IT staff. It’s just too much, and as an IT manager, you cannot support the business. As such, another model was born. This model is outsourced IT, offering managed services in an MRR or ARR pricing model.
And there are all kinds of managed services being offered. You might already have UCaaS, which is a managed service. And you get the benefits of not having to worry about upgrades and the service provider taking care of everything for you. So why not add more? As I said, there are all kinds – from device management and tracking to IoT analysis, security, storage, and disaster recovery.
And so we get back to the NetFortris acquisition. With this, Sangoma adds the following managed services, in addition to the ones we already have:
Managed Internet includes mixing and matching connectivity types by location and provides network monitoring, analytics, up/down circuit monitoring, and wireless backup.
Managed SD-WAN includes:
- Being able to handle multiple internet connections from multiple providers so that if one connection fails, the customer does not lose connectivity, resulting in uninterrupted uptime
- The ‘aggregation’ of bandwidth from those two different internet providers makes the customer kind of ‘see’ those as one pipe
- Traffic shaping whereby certain types of traffic can be given priority or forced down in priority
Managed Security, or unified threat management, for all traffic into the business network. This service helps protect customers against attacks and losses from spam, viruses, ransomware, botnets, etc.
In the following few blogs, I will go into more detail on each new managed service.