How to Make the Most of Your SIP Trunks

SIP trunks are rapidly gaining popularity among businesses for a variety of reasons. SIP trunks offer more control and are customizable to your requirements. Over the long term, they end up cheaper than hosted VoIP services purchased from a vendor. They are the ideal choice for most larger corporations that tend to operate from multiple locations. SIP trunk providers are also improving their service offerings constantly amid increasing competition. So much so that provisioning SIP trunks is almost as easy as their hosted counterpart today.

SIP trunks offer you control over your phone system which is certainly great. But it also means you don’t have anyone showing you the ropes. You may not know how to use them efficiently or the best practices for deployment. So keep reading to learn how to make the most out of your SIP trunks!

Secure Your SIP Trunks

This is the first and most important aspect of upgrading to SIP trunks from PRI lines. We are not accustomed to worrying about security with landlines but it is a real and pressing concern in the digital realm. VoIP and ISP trunks bring your voice calls to the same data network that is used throughout the company. Think of all the dangers your network faces on a daily basis. These same threats now target your enterprise phone system as well.

Distributed Denial of Service attacks, toll fraud, unauthorized use of the phones, eavesdropping etc. are just a few of the threat vectors. The same precautions you take to secure your network will help with protecting your voice calls. But you should add some more defensive tools to your kit like VoIP sensitive firewalls, beefing up credential and password management and so on. Real time monitoring software or hardware are also vital. This way you can detect unusual traffic patterns early and head off would be attackers.

Many companies start work on a Monday morning only to find that thousands of dollars have been charged to their account by unauthorized calls – usually international – made over the weekend. In most cases, you will be on the hook for the bill, so this is certainly something you want to avoid happening.

Eliminate Redundant Services

You know that SIP trunks let you make calls for free. You also understand that it banishes the prohibitive costs associated with international calling. But SIP trunks are capable of so much more than that. SIP trunks support voice calls, video calling, messaging applications, presence information and conference calling (with or without video) just to name a few. If you have been using other services for these purposes, you can easily switch them over to SIP trunks. After all, why pay for two applications or services that do the exact same thing right?

You can remove the hassle of making multiple payments to different vendors and consolidate all charges to a single provider. Your total costs should be less overall as well. When something goes wrong with one of your communication services, you know who you need to call. You don’t have to run around trying to figure out where the problem is and which provider will solve it for you. You have a single point of contact for everything from tech support to billing issues.

Start Thinking About Unified Communication

Unified communication or – UC as it is commonly called – does not refer to a single application or software. It is more of a marketing term that is applied to a whole suite of programs that form a cohesive whole. UC suites combine and consolidate different media and communication channels with a uniform UI and design. The user experience is much more consistent and intuitive.

Your employees don’t have to switch between contexts or wonder how to contact someone within the organization. It doesn’t matter if the other person is busy or can’t answer the landline. The UC suite can take care of reaching them by whatever means and rules have been set up in advance. So if the user has configured their account properly, the call or message will be delivered to their voicemail or inbox or mobile device appropriately.

Think of SIP trunks as the foundation that can enable you to do so much more with your communication strategy. Upgrading to SIP trunking is simply the starting point. SIP trunks not only support all the features from your existing PBX but add some more advanced tools into the mix. You can integrate voice calling with your other enterprise systems as well. Most vendors offer APIs that let you make calls from inside your CRM application, record timestamps and other metadata directly from calls etc.

This integration and interoperability is one of the main benefits of switching over to SIP trunks. So go ahead and explore all the possibilities your new system offers. Bring all your enterprise services together and see your productivity skyrocket!