About James Cropper
James Cropper is a world-class advanced materials and paper products group, with an operational reach in over 50 countries. Using materials from cotton and wood to carbon fibre they support industries from packaging to digital imaging and aerospace with products that are at the cutting edge of performance.
The business is renowned globally for its dedicated responses to custom projects and its award-winning commitment to the highest standards of sustainability.
The Project
James Cropper engaged Amillan to assist them in meeting several business objectives with a full upgrade of their corporate LAN and communications infrastructure.
During the pre-consultative excursive that Amillan carried out to design the best LAN solution for James Cropper, they mapped the wireless profile of the busy manufacturing site and developed a bespoke LAN & WLAN design that highlighted potential sources of interference.
In doing so, the deployed solution would then be able to prioritize important traffic and minimize latency for key applications, thus safeguarding core production activities.
In 2018 Amillan successfully implemented a new Alcatel-Lucent Data Networking solution at the main campus on time and within budget, subsequently moving on to support the expansion of the new LAN and WLAN out to remote sites across the world.
With their new robust LAN solution, James Cropper could also deploy Alcatel Lucent Enterprise’s OTNS to centrally monitor all alarms and trigger notifications, from multiple sources. This provided them with a critical health and safety function for all one workers across the site.
James Cropper are now capitalizing on their LAN networking investment as an enabler for business growth, with the procurement of more advanced manufacturing technology and introduction of unified communications lead smarter working initiatives.
Your network is facing a rapidly evolving threat landscape full of modern applications, exploits, malware, and attack strategies that can avoid traditional methods of detection. Threats are delivered via applications that:
Dynamically hop ports
Use non-standard ports
Tunnel within other applications
Hide within proxies, SSL or other types of encryption
Additionally, your enterprise is exposed to targeted and customised malware, which can easily pass undetected through traditional antivirus solutions.
Many of the above may be stopped by your existing firewall solution, but how many aren’t?
Amillan can now offer all customers a free Security Life-Cycle Report, to help you pinpoint exactly where the holes are in your data network security.
By placing a test appliance on your network and passively monitoring traffic for one week, Amillan can produce a custom risk assessment including real exposure to threats, user behavior, and application usage, helping you better understand the cyber risks your organisation faces.
Contact Amillan today for more information and to arrange your free Security Life-Cycle Report.
Home working, be it part or full time, increases the flexibility of labour while reducing its cost. The ubiquity of high speed internet connections gives an unprecedented flexibility to deploy work more effectively. This technology evolution also has a deep impact on Western countries economics, environment and on enterprise productivity.
Leading management consultants have found that employers expect to use more part time, temporary employees for an optimal use of their permanent workforce. Home working technologies will make it possible to hire a temporary workforce on an ad-hoc basis. This added flexibility could decrease the labour cost by nearly one third in the U.S. and Europe, helping to narrow the off-shored labour cost differences.
Another key factor is the impact on the environment. Home working has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions by 50 million tons in 2020. Alcatel-Lucent has calculated that the roll out of home working in one of its subsidiaries of 900 people, home working 50 days a year, had saved over 2,534,000 kilometres (1,575,000 miles), which is the equivalent of driving 63 times around the planet. It saved 318,200 litres (70,000 gallons) of gas.
Each employee also saved money: €231 (£183) each year and time by avoiding more than 100 hours driving during rush hours.
In addition, HR found that remote employees were more productive and satisfied across generations. GenY enjoyed a better work/life balance, and it helped retain and maintain the productivity of 55+ workers. For high performers, setting up their own work while working from any place was liberating and empowering.
What changes in work practices when an employee becomes a home worker? Tasks workers will access their business applications from their laptops while enjoying the voice quality of their IP phone which is just another extension of the telephony system. Knowledge workers will often prefer to collaborate through their PC, enjoying additional media such as IM and video and sharing presentations on line with colleagues, customers and partners. Lastly, travelling knowledge workers will, in many cases, prefer to collaborate from a tablet PC.
But if work is less and less a place we go to, communication and collaboration tools of choice should have the availability they have in the office, providing great ergonomics and be easy to use.
Amillan supports a Unified Communications approach, allowing workers to unleash productivity by being able to work more flexible and efficient. Contact Us today to see how we can implement UC for your business.
This article originally appeared on The Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Blog and is published with permission
PBX hacking is big business for criminals, with fraud losses estimated to be in the region of $4.4 billion. This type of fraud does not discriminate on size of organisation and the costs to businesses can be substantial.
Toll fraud – the unauthorised use of a communication system by hackers – is a method increasingly used by organised criminals who realise that while businesses are often up-to-speed in protecting their networks and PCs against sophisticated attacks, their communication solutions often prove to be a soft target. Organisations usually only discover they have become victims when presented with the bill!
Key indicators to look out for are a high volume of calls placed to international numbers from the same internal phone; a peak of long distance, out of hours calls; or an alert from your telephone operator showing multiple short-duration calls to a premium rate number. By this time you have probably been hacked.
Here are the top three factors that put your business ‘at risk’ to hacking: ageing systems, outdated security policies and careless configuration – particularly when it comes to integrating VoIP phones.
But if you answer ‘Yes’ to any of the questions below, then your business is at risk:
It is in response to this growing menace we have introduced a Toll Prevention Audit service to help companies introduce best practices and protection mechanisms to avoid many toll fraud scenarios. Here are the key elements of introducing best practice to help reduce toll fraud:
Businesses who apply the right protection mechanisms can make themselves much less appealing to fraudsters, and by following these simple steps it’s possible to ensure your communications solution is not a easy target.
This article originally appeared on The Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Blog and is re-published with permission
Since the late 80’s ISDN has been the de-facto telephony connectivity solution of choice; however, with no significant development in over a decade and a BT switch-off date set for 2025, it’s time to retire your ISDN for good.
Getting on for 2 million channels being used today, SIP trunking is fast-becoming the obvious replacement for traditional ISDN services. Aside from the significant financial savings possible with SIP, this has been driven by both the need for a more flexible approach to ‘voice’ and the requirements of Unified Communications.
1 – Save money on call costs and line rental
SIP delivers less costly, more reliable connectivity than ISDN over an IP connection. It can save up to 50% on line rentals and 25% or more on call costs.
2- Free internal calls and great features
Perfect for medium or large organisations with multiple sites, not only will you save on your line rental and call costs, but you’ll get free internal calls within your organisation and a whole host of great features.
3- Scale up and down when you want
SIP trunks are ideal if you are moving, upsizing or downsizing and want to keep your existing numbers. Scale up lines during busy periods and back down again afterwards. You can add lines, take them away, split calls at any time. You are always in control.
4- Built-in Business Continuity
SIP trunks can handle emergencies easily. They are inherently disaster recovery / business continuity ready, letting you reroute calls to an alternative location quickly and easily.
5- Compatible with Skype for Business
Our SIP trunks are integration tested and approved to interoperate with Microsoft Lync / Skype for Business, allowing you to directly connect to the platform to make external calls.
Contact Amillan today to learn more about our SIP Connectivity Solutions.
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