Telehealth and telemedicine aren’t new concepts, but emerging technologies and robust networks mean they can be implemented more easily and effectively.

However, there are still challenges to adoption and effective deployment, especially for government-supported initiatives. Key hurdles include budget constraints, siloed IT departments, and organizational structures that traditionally haven’t had to work together. To solve these problems, governments at all levels, in collaboration with community organizations, are turning to their technology partners.

Tim Lonsway, Regional Director at CBTS, works with many state and regional governments to adopt telehealth and telemedicine technologies. Adoption is growing, but there are still growing pains.

What is the state of telehealth today, and what’s driving it compared with a decade ago?

There’s private healthcare, but there are also hooks all over the place with education, higher education, and then, of course, government activity, because governments have hospitals. They do healthcare activities and health services. There are other opportunities such as addiction services and corrections facilities care for individuals, and even out into rural K-12 schools, where it’s hard to get nurses.

There are federal or state requirements that require a certain amount of capabilities to service the constituents of a given community. It’s exemplified by the fact that the federal government is funding certain programs to implement telehealth solutions into those rural areas to provide some additional help, or even in urban deserts where it’s difficult to attract and maintain a workforce.

What are some of the newer technologies that are helping deliver on these mandates?

It can be as simple as a laptop with a camera, a microphone, and an internet connection. But you still need the software and the software packages behind the scenes. You must document changes because ultimately there are compliance rules. Hospitals do a lot of collaboration and sharing of information, and they leverage a lot for training.

It’s really the ability to use, store, and share anything over a distance. You’re taking your entire hospital capabilities and putting them in the palm of your hand with mobile devices, laptops, and tablets.

Are there still technological challenges given the bandwidth available to remote communities, or do we have all the pieces?

The pieces are there. It’s the distribution of the capabilities that is always going to be a challenge, and the consistencies of the deployments. There are other technologies that may suck away bandwidth from those mission-critical life-saving activities. And then it’s the deployment of the individual technologies. Do the applications feed back properly into the various systems? Did you deploy the technology properly so it’s sustainable and supportable?

And you go into some of these smaller areas with these great ideas, like with K-12s, where you’re putting big kinds of multiple video box, all-in-one monitor, speaker, camera, keyboard, into a school, and the technology just sits there. And then, of course, there’s the quality of the individual implementations once you get out to remote and rural areas.

What are the key challenges for governments looking to support telehealth aside from budget constraints?

The biggest challenge is multiple governments or entities or agencies. Better end user services are different than mental health and addictive services, for example. It’s different than youth corrections facilities or adult corrections facilities. You not only have administrators and policy makers at the top, but your technologists within each of those silos. They all have different challenges and they create their own organizations. There’s lots of overlap. But those are starting to consolidate. It’s about the money, but it’s also about the inefficiencies of how the money gets allocated and distributed to deploy technology.

How are governments looking to technology partners like CBTS to solve these challenges?

The trend away from doing individual siloed work has really been going on for about 10 years, and has gotten a lot of traction over the last five or six years. The IT partner comes in and says, “We’ll take those basic infrastructure services off your plate. We’ll worry about compliance and adoption and availability, security vulnerabilities, bandwidth constraints, computing constraints, resource management, all that stuff. You can focus on the business of treating cases or educating students or whatever it is you might be doing.”

That’s really where the partnerships come together. They help governments focus further upstream and break down those silos.

How beneficial are emerging technologies and “as-a-Service” models for deploying them?

In these environments, they may or may not have an enterprise network. Plain internet connections aren’t secure or robust enough to handle the traffic. The ability to leverage software-defined networks to prioritize the traffic and create what looks like an enterprise network meshes it all together and creates the right environment.

Network-as-a-Service or compute-as-a-service, storage-as-a-service, SD-WAN, even wireless LAN-as-a-service enables organizations to basically create line items on their monthly invoice at a consumption level. You can predict it, you can plan for it, you can budget it. Those types of services are tremendous for government. The adoption of partnerships are there and they’re continuing to expand and grow.

Network as a Service (NaaS) technology isn’t typically associated with Opening Day and baseball, but with the 2018 season now under way, it’s a great time for us to share details about a technology partnership between CBTS and the Cincinnati Reds.

The Reds are leveraging the CBTS NaaS solution, built on Cisco Meraki technology, to create pop-up networks at each of the team’s minor league facilities and Spring Training facility that are accessible through Meraki’s Auto Virtual Private Network technology.

This technology allows Reds Front Office executives and scouts to watch players in real time at any one of the team’s locations across the United States. In previous years, Reds officials had to wait for videos of players to be transmitted digitally, which is an inefficient, time-consuming and expensive process.

CBTS provides monitoring, management of NaaS

CBTS sourced the necessary Internet connectivity at each Reds location, deployed the solution, and provides 24/7/365 monitoring and management of the network. CBTS’ NaaS solution is secure, flexible, and will scale to meet the team’s future needs.

“MLB is an extremely competitive landscape, and leveraging NaaS technology from CBTS will give the Reds an important edge as we work to develop top talent and scout across our organization,” said Brian Keys, Vice President of Technology at the Cincinnati Reds, in a release announcing the partnership.

Click here to learn more about Network as a Service from CBTS.

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When the NCAA Final Four comes to San Antonio this weekend, part of the excitement will be under the stadium seats. That’s where many of the Alamodome’s 750 new wireless access points were installed to ensure that basketball fans have connectivity even at the most intense moments. The connectivity boost is part of a larger, $50 million renovation project, and is designed to improve coverage to accommodate a sellout crowd expected to reach 65,000 people, according to published accounts. 

“We always thought we would improve the WiFi,” Alamodome General Manager Nicholas Langella told MSR. “We took the bull by the horns and got it done.”

Alamodome extends wireless, cellular signals

Upgrading data connectivity is a challenge for many cities hosting major sports events. Earlier this year, Minneapolis focused on improving connectivity citywide in advance of hosting the Super Bowl, which drew as many as 1 million visitors to the city. Minneapolis’ $1.1 billion U.S. Bank Stadium, completed in 2016, features more than $60 million in technology capabilities, according to local media accounts. This technology includes 1,300 wireless access points located on railings and underneath seats, and a DAS that was upgraded for the Super Bowl.  

Wireless connectivity not just about stadiums

Two smartphone apps designed for the Vikings and U.S. Bank Stadium provide driving and public transit directions to the stadium, and also help visitors find their seats and amenities using a system similar to turn-by-turn navigation commonly found in cars. These apps are powered by 2,000 Bluetooth beacons that help pinpoint each user’s precise location within the stadium. This technology also helps facilitate in-seat ordering and other services.  

Cities that hold large events are also working to expand connectivity beyond stadiums. Minneapolis, for example, boosted wireless and WiFi capacity at its airport and convention center. Wireless carriers increased capacity to a downtown pedestrian mall near the stadium by adding small cell technology to new bus shelters built for the event. Even the Mall of America, located far from downtown, added 1,200 antennas, 50 miles of cable, and temporary WiFi access points to accommodate the Super Bowl crush, according to published reports. 

Common threads 

Host cities and their stadiums have undertaken common strategies to boost connectivity, including: 

• Bringing wireless closer to users. Bringing wireless access points closer to users—not on the ceiling or elsewhere in the building – is a key to handling so many connections at once inside stadiums. 
• Connectivity analyses. It’s critical to identify problem areas for wireless signals that can lead to congestion. Some carriers have even used drones to identify trouble spots within stadiums. 
• Keeping it neutral. Many DAS investments have been designed as “neutral hosts,” which allows multiple wireless carriers to install their own equipment on the systems, instead of building duplicative ones. 
• Focusing on the future. Cities, carriers, and stadiums view connectivity investments as part of their economic development efforts that will drive prosperity long after the party’s over. 

“Our city is the Midwest’s premier tech hub and quickly becoming a serious player nationally,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told the Associated Press. “To keep that momentum trucking and continue recruiting top talent, we’ll need a 21st century communication infrastructure — and these investments will help make sure that we have one.” 

CBTS is helping governments leverage Smart City technologies to help improve the customer experience for residents and visitors. To learn more about our expert insights, please click here.

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As Jon Lloyd sees it, leveraging UCaaS and SD-WAN technology to meet retail business challenges is a lot like using your athletic skills wisely in competitive sports. Every player has strengths and limitations, and you can’t control what the competition does. However, you can control your own effort, and if you do that, you can win, says Lloyd, who is a senior solution design engineer for CBTS. 

Jon’s been with CBTS for the past six years, designing voice and data systems that help retailers and other businesses of different sizes  gain ground over their rivals by getting ahead of the technology curve. Over the past year, he’s focused on SD-WAN as an alternative to the much more costly and less efficient MPLS. 

To get a solid leg up on the competition, says Jon, C-Suite executives need to take advantage of technology as a tool for fostering better interactions with their customers as well as for improving communications among employees. Here are more of Jon’s thoughts on how technology can help retailers overcome business challenges. 

What kinds of issues do retailers face today? 

In their advertising, retailers have always highlighted their own competitive advantages, whether that’s being the best, the biggest, or the least expensive. Now, however, there’s an increasing push among retailers to emphasize their mobile apps and other aspects of the online experience. I call this the Amazon effect, or ‘Keeping up with the Joneses.’ 

For example, Starbucks a few years back came out with a pioneering mobile app. Dunkin’ Donuts recently followed suit with a huge, six-month advertising blitz for its own new mobile app.  

Today, even a small pizza shop needs an online presence. Restaurants use their web pages to play up promotions like, “buy one pizza, get one free.” Companies like Grubhub work with restaurants of all sizes to provide web-enabled meal delivery. 

How can technology like UCaaS and SD-WAN help retailers?  

With the right call center technology in place, for instance, a small retailer can look like a Fortune 500 corporation, providing an omnichannel experience to customers.  

Through Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) systems, a retailer can receive a fully managed, company-wide network that might include Internet access as well as services such as call centers, VoIP, instant messaging, email, videoconferencing, and data.  

This is all without any upfront capital expense. Retailers pay only for the services they need, on a monthly OpEx basis.  

UCaaS architectures are also highly scalable, enabling companies to quickly add or drop branch locations and apps in keeping with the business climate. 

SD-WAN technology permits easy and affordable any-to-any routing among headquarters and far-flung branch offices, while also letting businesses give priority to any apps they want.  

Why should retailers choose CBTS?  

On the whole, retailers don’t want to be technology nerds. They don’t want to be spending their time counting how many packets are crossing the wires. What they do want is to attract customers who’ll spend money on their goods and services. 

CBTS is not a chef. We don’t know how to whip up delicious meals for hundreds or thousands of guests a night. What we do know is how to support a retailer’s business challenges and brand messaging with technology.  

We have 140 years of experience as a technology innovator, and 20 years as a UCaaS provider. CBTS allows retailers to keep up with – and even to far surpass – the “Joneses,” by offloading the IT portion of the competitive equation and letting retailers concentrate on what they do best – their core businesses.  

To learn  more about how CBTS is helping retailers leverage technology, please click here.

CBTS helps clients drive business outcomes through the right technology products and services.

These business outcomes don’t just include financial goals. Healthcare providers, for example, consider providing value-based care a critical business outcome as they move away from volume-based models of care.

Healthcare has experienced massive consolidation over the past decade, a trend that is taxing internal IT resources. CBTS is partnering with several large healthcare organizations that, after growing through a series of mergers and acquisitions, are managing disparate voice technologies across multiple locations.

These organizations need a cost-efficient, holistic solution that meets their current needs, scales for future growth, and gives their internal IT organizations bandwidth to focus on value-added initiatives.

CBTS is there to help drive these specific desired business outcomes.

The Case in Point

CBTS recently implemented a Cisco-based Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution for a major regional healthcare organization with $5.6 billion in assets and 33,000 employees. This organization is the largest healthcare provider in the State of Ohio, and has hospitals and physician offices throughout Ohio and Kentucky.

Ultimately, the client had to replace a mix of outdated PBX systems that it inherited through a series of acquisitions, and move to a single UCaaS solution for all locations. The solution also required improved quality of service (QoS) for voice calling, supporting the quick addition of new properties, meeting compliance requirements, and supporting teleconferencing and other apps that are essential to improving the patient experience.

A Fully Managed Healthcare Solution

CBTS recommended a hosted, fully managed voice solution in this case to support the client’s desired business outcomes and IT resource needs.

With this solution now in place, the rapidly growing healthcare provider can focus its internal IT resources on value-added initiatives while CBTS manages its voice network, which must be available 24x7x365 to support continuous patient care.

CBTS also is managing the client’s migration from legacy PBX to new VoIP systems on a site-to-site basis. Currently, the older equipment and new UCaaS systems are centrally managed from the CBTS Enterprise Network Operations Center (ENOC).

The CBTS solution also supports TelePresence Video Centers now available across acute care facilities throughout the client’s healthcare network for videoconferencing among medical practitioners. After an initial rollout at 50 sites, new units are being added on a gradual basis.

CBTS staff at the ENOC also administers a Cisco Emergency Responder (CER), which works with the Cisco phone system to enhance 911 calling. CER is designed to ensure calls are routed to the correct Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) for the caller’s location, and that emergency calls are returned if necessary. The emergency response system also tracks phone locations.

A number of integration points are included in the network for easy addition of third-party healthcare apps.

People Power, Too

Engineering expertise is necessary to fully leverage this innovative technology.  CBTS deployed two dozen employees to the client’s network sites – including project managers, design architects, and implementation and design engineers – along with approximately 40 professional consultants specializing in various aspects of this project.

This is what we mean when we say CBTS helps our clients drive business outcomes.

CBTS has extensive experience working with multi-site health care organizations on their voice application needs. Want to learn more about this ongoing healthcare IT initiative? Read the case study here.

The IT professionals at CBTS have broad expertise across multiple practices: Communications, Cloud Services, Infrastructure Solutions, and Consulting Services. This allows CBTS to engineer and implement solutions that are tailored to meet customer needs.  

CBTS clients include Fortune 20 and Forbes Global 2000 companies. We serve organizations in all verticals, including Education, where we recently demonstrated our broad expertise and customized approach with client Morehead State University (MSU).  

MSU serves nearly 11,000 undergraduate and graduate students from 41 states and 31 countries, and operates a main campus and regional campuses throughout eastern Kentucky. MSU engaged CBTS while moving to a universal communications infrastructure that integrates voice, video, and data. The solution also reduces costs across MSU’s five branches. 

MSU invested in a cloud-enabled collaborative communications system from Cisco, which CBTS fully manages.  

Lower Costs for Voice Calling  

The new solution allowed MSU to move from an antiquated analog PBX system into the Hosted Enterprise Unified Communications (UC) solution from CBTS, which features a utility based pricing model and consistent experience across MSU’s footprint. The solution includes 1,500 Cisco handsets with charges billed per phone on a monthly basis, which creates a predictable pricing model. 

This solution is also driving more collaboration and greater productivity among MSU’s faculty and other staff.  

Additional Collaborative Tools 

Hosted Enterprise UC from CBTS features a full suite of unified communication apps from Cisco, including telephony, messaging, softphone, instant messaging (IM) and presence, video, conferencing, and more.  

CBTS also incorporated a centralized SIP trunking system for MSU, which provides a secure digital PBX environment. Other components include a call manager and call centers. CBTS provided all network design, installation, training, and monitoring for the unified cloud infrastructure, and handles remote monitoring and management. 

MSU is just one example of how we have broad expertise throughout the IT landscape.  There are many more examples like this with other technologies such as cloud, consulting and infrastructure. 

Want to discover more about the fully managed networks at MSU? Read the case study here. 

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Part 1 – Legacy WANs are Complex. 

Historically, WANs (Wide Area Networks) are complex. In a distributed enterprise with multiple locations, you had to invest in dedicated MPLS circuits to connect all sites together.  Even then, you weren’t able to get the bandwidth necessary to truly meet the needs of your business.  For example, you’d have to purchase a T1 at all of your branch locations from your service provider for the MPLS connectivity.  That provider would then place a router at the edge of your network, which you do not have access to, route all traffic back to a head end.

In this type of deployment, you had one primary goal:  Give me a private, dedicated circuit to connect to my head end that has consistent quality and reliability to ensure by business does not suffer.

MPLS was a great solution at the time because the transition to the cloud really hadn’t started.  All of your compute (servers, etc), was still on premise, as were your applications and storage.  You HAD to connect back to a head end, so what better way than MPLS?

To meet this goal, you HAD to invest in this technology.  First off, lower cost bandwidth was nowhere near as reliable and you certainly couldn’t get quantity of bandwidth that is readily available today.  A simple cost/benefit analysis would prove that this just wasn’t an option.

The downside of the MPLS investment is two-fold:  1. Lack of bandwidth speed, and not easily scalable.  2. Lack of visibility.  Sure, you’re getting better quality and reliability – no argument there; however, you can’t truly see what’s happening across the MPLS network, you can’t guarantee control of your applications, and you have no real mechanism to hold your MPLS provider accountable if they are not meeting their SLA.

Part 2 – Movement to the Cloud. 

As the 2010s came around, there has been a historic shift to “Cloud Services”.  It’s almost cliché to a point, but it’s true.  There is such a large shift in cloud investments, that keeping services on premise is becoming a rarity.  For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are making on premise compute and data centers essentially obsolete.  They make it so easy to spin up and migrate data centers to the cloud  that businesses are able to become more nimble than ever before.  The same rings true for phone systems.  You used to have to invest in a large phone system that would sit in a telecom closet somewhere in your facility.  If your building lost power, you were done.  Now, if you buy an on premise phone system you are in the minority.  Cloud Phone Systems give you so much more flexibility and features than an on-premise ever would.

Those two are the low hanging fruit, but let’s not forget about Software-as-a-Service.  The days of keeping local servers for applications such as email, customer relationship management, billing, etc. are long gone.  You can now move almost any application to the cloud to give you much better flexibility, quality, and reliability than ever before  The list goes on and on: Storage, Security, are just a couple of more examples.

This movement to the cloud has two HUGE implications if a business is still running on a legacy WAN.  1. Not enough bandwidth to support the demand of cloud applications.  2. Can’t guarantee quality and reliability to cloud-hosted applications outside of your existing WAN.

Part 3 – SD-WAN, Another Cloud Service

I mentioned in the last paragraph about all of the services moving to the cloud.  Why does the network have to be any different?  It doesn’t.  This is where SD-WAN comes in.  SD-WAN, by Industry Terms is:

The software-defined wide area network (SD–WAN) is a specific application of software-defined networking (SDN) technology applied to WAN connections, which are used to connect enterprise networks – including branch offices and data centers – over large geographic distances.

In the MPLS days, as you are designing the network, you talk in terms of “What kind of bandwidth do I need at the branch location to connect back into my head end”, but there isn’t really a lot of talk around business outcomes.  That conversation changes with SD-WAN, where we start talking about Outcome-Based Networking. 

When we talk about Outcome Based Networking with our clients, we start asking about what applications are critical to your business in order for you to be successful.  Thus, what outcomes do you need from your WAN to make you succeed?

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How can a wireless access point create a lifelong dream to explore the world’s oceans?

Well the answer is simple. Well not “really” simple. But if the access point is located in an elementary school that leverages CBTS’ scalable Network as a Service (NaaS) solution, then the following scenario could unfold:

Miss Wheeler’s 2^nd grade class has been waiting for this day all year.  The Woods Hole Oceanographic Research Institute has selected her class to participate in a remote session with marine biologists aboard the research vessel Atlantis, which is currently located just off the Galapagos Islands.  The students will listen to and speak with the scientists about the research they are conducting.  The grand finale includes the children using remote technology to control the robotic arm of Alvin, the Institute’s advanced research submersible, a mile and a half deep and almost 3000 miles away.

The children are excited; a few have never seen anything like this before, growing up in the Midwest.  Miss Wheeler is excited for them and continues to check with Steve, the school’s IT administrator, who is on hand for the event to ensure everything will go smoothly.  She would hate to see the children disappointed as sometimes the school’s Internet can be a little questionable (apparently the 5^th grade teachers like to binge watch The Great British Baking Show while their classes are at gym, lunch or recess, and use all the bandwidth).

Now Steve is comfortable because he knows the school system had recently converted to NaaS from CBTS, the most flexible, reliable, secure and scalable solution available to them.  Steve knows that CBTS manages the solution for him with a staff of world-class engineers and operators ready, at a moment’s notice, to solve any issue.  Steve also knows about The British Baking Show marathon so, at the click of a button, he requested a private SSID for this specific event with traffic shaping enabled, allocating priority to the remote session traffic.  All changes were executed on his existing NaaS hardware, with zero downtime and via rapid and flexible cloud management.  Oh, and he requested a filter for Nexflix traffic on the remainder of the network.

So ultimately, Steve can relax knowing that CBTS NaaS will do its part to ensure that Miss Wheeler’s 2^nd grade class will enjoy their opportunity of a lifetime.  Miss Wheeler can smile as one little girl steps up to the screen and sees an image transmitted from 3000 miles away of a hydrothermal vent 1 ½ miles under the ocean, then reaches out and in real-time controls the robotic arm of a real submersible, fueling dreams of one day becoming a marine biologist herself.   Or that wireless access point could be from another less reliable solution. In this scenario, as the little girl steps excitedly up to the screen, her dream dies before it ever had a chance as she sees, “Safari cannot open page”.  While just down the hall, consuming all the school’s available bandwidth, the 5^th grade teachers look on aghast as yet another baker is sent home for having presented a scone, which was just not round enough.

CBTS NaaS incorporates features designed to meet the needs of educational institutions of all sizes.  As solutions become more complex and the demand for growth, security and operational oversight increase, you need a solution to keep pace now and in the future.  CBTS NaaS provides the capabilities to meet and exceed those needs with key benefits such as:

• Scalability
  • Designed for distributed environments
  • Grows with your needs
  • Reliable for high number of client devices
• Flexibility
  • Self-maintaining devices automatically retrieve configurations/updates from the cloud
  • On-demand MACD
  • Plug-and-play device addition
• Security
  • Segmented SSIDs for different user groups with full policy configuration
  • Detection and containment of wireless threats in real time
  • Identification of attack profiles: rogue SSID, spoofing, packet floods
  • Content and user filtering at the AP level
  • Application level throttling
  • Policy-based management: bandwidth limits, firewall/traffic shaping
• Centralized Management
  • Aggregated visibility: sites, devices, users, applications
  • One click configuration change
  • Alerting
  • Auto VPN (SD-WAN) provides secure site-to-site connectivity
• Intuitive reporting
  • Who is using the network: devices, users, applications, websites, ports, etc.
  • For what are they using it: bandwidth, application, individual client usage

Leveraging CBTS NaaS in your school system or campus environment provides the robust capabilities to ensure students of all ages have the ability to achieve great learning opportunities while giving IT administrators the peace of mind to know that the network is ready for what comes next.

And, our man Steve? He also knows that if, on a really slow day, he lets the 5^th grade teachers watch The British Baking Show season finales, well, he’s got the pick of the doughnuts in the teachers’ lounge for life.

Whether your manufacturing business is large or small, 24x7x365 uptime availability and secure, dependable operations are critical to success. Regardless of the cause, network equipment or software failures in the factory environment threaten productivity and competitiveness and could result in unnecessary and potentially devastating manufacturing delays. Fortunately, Network as a Service (NaaS) offers a solution. By moving from an MPLS network to the NaaS approach, your company could utilize reliable, managed connectivity between locations provided by a trusted network services advisor to eliminate downtime while reducing CapEx costs.

NaaS Scalability and Security

NaaS is a highly scalable approach that meets the IT requirements of both single- and multi-location businesses. Companies pay a monthly fee that covers the equipment, network management services, and support along with an extended warranty program that ends technology obsolescence by building automatic and managed hardware upgrades into the solution lifecycle.

NaaS solutions empower SMB through enterprise organization with the ability to focus on their core businesses, to grow their companies and achieve enterprise-grade network capabilities without the headaches of learning the ins and outs of network management. These solutions also integrate state-of-the-art SD-WAN technology that enables larger midmarket and enterprise businesses with multiple sites to achieve centralized, highly customizable network management solutions with multilevel perimeter security from an on-premises location.

Easy & Efficient Integration

CBTS’ NaaS solutions with SD-WAN are delivered as easy to install all-in-one network appliances that seamlessly connect multiple locations together while supplying advanced network analytics. Based on Cisco’s Meraki technology, the solutions also provide cloud integration, dashboard-based network monitoring and management, a next-generation firewall for network security, Wi-Fi for agile manufacturing on the shop floor, and flexible routing and switching for taking bandwidth to new heights.

Multi-location businesses now have access to customized solutions to address their specific IT needs, making it easier to use available resources more efficiently without sacrificing security. Branch locations can take advantage of bandwidth-intensive applications that were once limited to larger hub offices. Using Meraki’s built-in auto VPN technology, NaaS solutions quickly plug in to facilitate distributed networking over the Internet, cellular wireless networks, and existing MPLS infrastructures.

Security doesn’t stop at the firewall layer. NaaS solutions with SD-WAN also integrate security tools that include unified threat management, intrusion detection and prevention systems, gateway antivirus software, content filtering, application control, and advanced encryption standards for data privacy, which is particularly useful for companies that partner and share data with manufacturing entities across the globe.

Reduce manufacturing vulnerabilities while increasing productivity and maintaining uptime with CBTS’ comprehensive NaaS solutions. This secure, cost-saving solution with SD-WAN connectivity makes it easy to migrate to a higher-performance network while reducing IT management burdens for operations of all sizes.

CIO Review has named CBTS to its list of the 20 Most Promising Unified Communications Solution Providers for 2017, and is featuring an interview with Chief Technology Officer Tom Simpson in its March edition.

In an interview with CIO Review, Simpson discussed three key CBTS services:

• Enterprise Hosted Communications Solution: EHCS is built on Cisco’s HCS product and is a fully hosted and managed solution that provided enterprise-grade voice, video and business communications services.
• Network as a Service: A fully managed solution that provides customers with a simple, scalable method to offload the complex task of maintaining and securing a commercial network.
• SD-WAN: A solution that allows businesses with multi-site locations to support mobile workforces while reducing the need for expensive MPLS connections.

The story also highlights CBTS’ work with the State of Ohio, where our Next-Generation Telephony Service (NGTS) solution has saved the State $5.3 million in the first 18 months of use while providing a suite of collaboration tools that mark a significant upgrade from the State’s previous system.

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