When six members of Griffin’s Technical Support Team called in with flulike symptoms earlier this year, Griffin implemented their contingency plan and all staff that could, worked from home.
Using Griffin’s own MPLS IPVPN they were able to receive calls and access the corporate network as if they were in the office. Thankfully the outbreak was contained; all staff recovered within a week and customer service statistics were unaffected.
Resellers may want to put similar plans into action for themselves, but there is also an opportunity here to sell cost effective, scalable remote working services to their own customers.
Andrew Dickinson, Sales & Marketing Director at Griffin commented: "Outbreaks of flu and ash clouds disrupting flight schedules and are just some of the recent issues affecting UK businesses. Resellers have an opportunity here to add value to their customers and increase monthly revenue by replacing voice and data networks with MPLS solutions, allowing employees to securely access data from home and to work as if they were in the office taking calls. Griffin’s Agile MPLS solution for remote working has rocketed and with our Partners we are closing around 50% of bids we work on."
Disaster recovery
With the economy as it has been and the advances in technology IT Managers have been looking to reduce their costs by looking at Cloud Computing and with more and more data being hosted in the cloud, the higher the risk of data being lost or stolen. Griffin’s Virtual SANServe offering provides Resellers with a simple, secure solution that can be mirrored in multiple data centres for a belt and braces product. Unlike other hosted solutions in the marketplace Resellers do not need to buy expensive servers and if a host server fails data is migrated to another working host server within minutes.
Adrian Sunderland CTO, Griffin Internet commented: “Griffin is unique in having an enterprise grade Cloud Computing platform powered by VMWare and a carrier grade MPLS network. Partners can setup Virtual Data Centres (VDCs) in which they can provision virtual machines. Each VDC has a private VLAN linking all the virtual machines together and firewall-protected access to the Internet, enabling partners to offer public cloud services. For those partners that also sell Griffin MPLS VPN services, then each MPLS customer can also be linked into one or more VDCs – enabling the creation of private clouds. All this from only £64 per virtual machine with same day setups and only 1 month commitments – hosting for the channel will never be the same again. The combination of enterprise grade virtualisation, secure public cloud and MPLS private cloud represents a huge opportunity for the channel.”
Source: Source Comms Business July 2010.
Adrian Sunderland
