Government Body Taps Ingate Systems, eTechHelp to Bring Cisco & Office 365 Together

By Steve Anderson
Contributing TMCnet Writer

The importance of having up-to-date technology in the office can scarcely be understated. Without the right tools, everything from small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to enterprise operations misses out on opportunities to save money and improve revenue. But small business is scarcely alone in this, as even government bodies are discovering the kind of value inherent in having the right tools on hand to get the job done. That's where the North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) came in by bringing some outside help to bring its computing apparatus up to snuff with new, powerful tools.

The NCTCOG called in Ingate Systems (News - Alert) and eTechHelp to help consolidate the various unified communications (UC) systems operating within the group, and better link it up with Microsoft Office 365. Previously, the NCTCOG was using a combination of Cisco Unified Communications (News - Alert) and Microsoft Exchange Online, which posed a decent opportunity for the duo to update the system. To that end, eTechHelp brought in an Ingate Systems SIParator Enterprise Session Border Controller (E-SBC) to create the necessary integration and bring down a bit of the complexity. A second SIParator system was also put in to serve as a note of redundancy and disaster recovery support, so that if there was a power failure or similar issue at the primary location, service was less likely to be lost altogether.

The E-SBC not only provides the necessary infrastructure to achieve the desired integration, but it also provides a measure of security geared toward protecting against things like both denial of service (DoS) and theft of service attacks. Plus, there's also protection for privacy here, as the E-SBC can encrypt the session initiation protocol (SIP) signaling, as well as the media traffic, to allow NCTCOG's 14 separate locations to intermingle without exposing data to outside traffic.

Thanks to eTechHelp's efforts, meanwhile, the system was put in as platform-agnostic, allowing the system to more readily work with other elements and help achieve better interoperability, making the system as a whole easier to maintain and resupply as needed. Since Ingate Systems and eTechHelp have worked together for over a decade—according to word from Ingate Systems' president Steven Johnson (News - Alert)—that level of interoperability was much simpler to provide, and yielded minimal risk for companies like NCTCOG. Ingate's SBC system is reportedly compatible with over 40 different public branch exchange (PBX (News - Alert)) platforms, and over 80 separate SIP trunking providers, so Ingate Systems is likely to work well with what's on hand.

Having these tools on hand will likely result in NCTCOG being able to better serve its patrons and provide more value accordingly. The disaster recovery systems will likely prove particularly helpful, as predicting a disaster is a tough notion at best. But when a disaster does strike, being able to recover quickly and get back into the process of normal operations can be a massively valuable help toward recovery in other sectors as well, particularly when it's government operations impacted by disaster, as many of these are involved in disaster recovery elsewhere, like police, fire and similar units.

The right tool for the right job helps ensure that the job gets done faster, more efficiently, and in a fashion that not only saves businesses time and money, but also improves relations with the community and those who use said businesses' services. For a government organization this makes even more sense, and in the end, tools like Ingate Systems and eTechHelp's can only really help make things better for all concerned.

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Edited by Maurice Nagle