FAQs

What is the difference between private, public, and hybrid cloud infrastructure?

• Private cloud is a dedicated company infrastructure for select business users.
• Public cloud is a cloud infrastructure that can be used and shared by everyone in a completely secured environment.
• Hybrid cloud is a combination of both and therefore allows for more flexibility since resources can be used as and when they are needed.

Why would I need colocation?

A colocation is a data centre facility that allows a business to rent space for servers and other computing hardware. Usually with colocation you receive access to the building, cooling, power, bandwidth and physical security, while the client would typically provide servers and storage.

There are several reasons why a business may choose to use colocation as opposed to running their own data centre:

• Capital cost – It is extremely expensive to own and run a data centre due to the ongoing maintenance and security requirements associated with managing such a facility.
• Save money and space – Moving servers and networks to colocation facilities allow businesses and organisations to save money and space within their own premises.
• Bespoke requirements – Rapidly growing businesses may find themselves with insufficient bandwidth or unable to manage the increased responsibility of protecting sensitive data if attempting to run their own data centre.
• Fast, low-latency connectivity – Dedicated colocation facilities ensure that businesses have access to services that work quickly and effectively and will continue to operate through any crisis or disaster.
• Disaster recovery – Taking advantage of a disaster recovery (DR) service provides extra security for your business should the worst happen.

How do hosted telephony and unified communications benefit my business over traditional phone systems?

In any small-to-medium-sized business even the slightest cost saving or efficiency boost can make a huge difference. Cloud-based hosted telephony  eliminates many of the practical and technical headaches that plague traditional on-site phone systems. In partnership with IDE you can obtain the benefits of developing and implementing a unified communications strategy for your business through:

• Improved flexible working practices – The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the need for cloud-based communication that offers flexible working and can accommodate remote working arrangements for employees who need to remain productive whilst out of the office.
• Increased productivity – A reliable hosted unified communications system that supports and promotes the demands of a mobile workforce, improves access to key employees and increases overall productivity throughout the business.
• Reduced hardware and call related costs – With no capital outlay, free upgrades, and no hardware to maintain, as well as free local and mobile call options, your business can benefit from significant savings. Plus, with built-in disaster recovery and business continuity features, you’ll be able to keep working during a crisis.
• Increased availability of communications – The reduction in hardware maintenance costs and increased call routing techniques provide great accessibility for our customers. Never miss a customer call utilising advanced call routing techniques such as voice mail with email forwarding, call queuing and Huntgroups to minimise wait times, ‘device twinning’ that allows employees to answer calls while away from their desks, and a wealth of call analytics reporting and advanced call routing capabilities. Remember, 85% of people never call back!
• Unified communications – The integration of telephony with desktop applications provides access to a wide range of potential collaboration tools between employees and customers. Useful features include presence indication to recognise who is available for contact, instant messaging to allow ad-hoc discussion, audio and video conferencing to increase efficiency and reduce travel time/costs, and call integration with your favourite customer relationship management applications so that employees have instant access to customer information when they receive a call.
• Fully managed services from IDE Group – Our managed services provide access to a wealth of technical support personnel who are highly-familiar with voice-calling, Microsoft applications, cloud-based operations, as well as complete UK-based geographical engineering and quality business strategy consultants. We can take your business requirements and create and implement a single unified communications strategy that is tailored to your business demands for the next three years and beyond.
• Fully workable solutions today – IDE provides more than just words and can provide you with a total demonstration of ‘Unified Communications at Work’, fuelling your imagination and helping your business aspirations to become a reality so that you can gain a key business advantage over your competitors.

We already have our own IT department, but we still need seldom support from time to time. Can you help?

If your on-site technical assistance is currently limited, using field engineers can help you extend that reach. IDE Group’s smart hands engineers provide assistance with deployment, installations, troubleshooting, testing, and hardware replacements at your remote sites or data centres.

Our computers seem to be running slowly, is there a way you can fix this remotely?

We offer a variety of remote support solutions. Provided you have a working internet connection, one of our IT engineers will be able to remotely access your computer in order to investigate and address any issues.

What is DDoS protection?

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack can compromise businesses and quickly overwhelm a network, taking services offline. The potential impact of such an outage will be immediate and severe as customers and other users will be locked out, potentially for a significant amount of time. We offer a large hosted DDoS protection service that is based in the UK and our high-speed detection and forensic analysis software analyses all our network traffic for threats.

What are managed IT services?

The value that modern organisations create is founded within their customer proposition but is increasingly delivered by IT platforms. Designing, developing, implementing and supporting IT is complex, potentially costly, and often risky. IDE Group will take responsibility for your IT while you take care of business.

What are tech bars and what type of business would need them?

The tech bar model provides a walk-up service that allows on-site users to resolve their IT issues.  From small-to-medium-sized businesses through to bigger corporate organisations, this solution can support any business who would like to offer their staff immediate support for their IT problems. Tech bars allow staff to walk straight up and get their laptop or other portable device looked at quickly and efficiently at a designated location within a business.

What is lifecycle management and why do people need it?

Device management, also known as IT lifecycle management, is the process of procuring, installing, maintaining, supporting, and retiring a device. It is important to have the support of experienced professionals who can successfully manage your devices. Device management is a cost efficient and scalable service that can maximise device ROI and free up in-house resources for specialist tasks.

What is MPLS and why should I use IDE?

MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) is a way of connecting multiple remote sites into one integrated network through a private connection. Available in more than 60 UK data centres, our network is continuously expanding to include existing and new data centre locations. Because we own the entire network, we offer contract options that are not offered by our competitors, including elastic bandwidth, expedited services, and short-term commitments. Find out more about MPLS connectivity.

How do I meet the growing burden of device management?

As companies deepen their digital transformation, the number and range of personal productivity devices that staff use to gain access to changing IT infrastructures has grown. Many employees use three or more different IT devices every day, including PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. No wonder then that managing their device estate effectively is becoming an increasing burden for organisations.

We are looking for laptops to set up our employees to work from home. Can you supply the laptops and help us set up remote working?

Acquisition of devices and accessories can be provided via outright purchase or through a leasing scheme. Either way, our scale and established vendor relationships will maximise your purchasing power. Once ordered, devices and accessories will be delivered to our secure facility, asset managed on our configuration management database, and stored until required.

What is dark fibre?

Dark fibre is optical fibre infrastructure that is not yet connected to transmission equipment. Data is transported over optical fibre networks by passing light through the cables. As these cables are buried in the ground, this can be an expensive and disruptive process.

How do I change my company details?

To amend your contact details, please contact your account manager. If you don’t know your current account manager’s name, please contact us on 0344 874 2020 or email us on internal.sales@idegroup.com

What are your IT support opening hours?

Our customers and partners are our primary focus and we are proud to be able to support them whenever they have any IT issues. Our friendly and professional team is available 24/7 to support you.