Page 8 – Bluewave Technology Group

6 IT Strategies for a Productive Hybrid Work Environment

Posted on September 6, 2021November 19, 2024 by Bluewave

How to Create an Effective, Secure and Productive Workspace In and Out of the Office

Six Strategies to Help You with Your Hybrid Workforce

Over the past two years, organizations around the globe were unexpectedly forced to move their employees to a fully remote work environment. Many teams were unprepared for the transition, either from lack of tools, proper communication, or both. Now, it seems the new normal involves implementing a hybrid work model that consists of employees working both remotely and in the office. The transition between going from full-time office work in a physical space to working part-time from home can be overwhelming, and dips in employee productivity seem almost inevitable.

In many cases, the tools implemented in a rapid shift to “work from home,” while a necessary band-aid at the beginning of the pandemic, aren’t the right solutions for a long-term hybrid work environment. Bluewave is working with our customers to help them navigate the multitude of options in the market and develop a cohesive solution that meets the demands of their unique business situation. Through our unique approach to technology lifecycle management, our experts work to integrate contracts, finance, inventory, and vendors at every stage. With the proper strategies in place, employees can have the same level of productivity and the same quality work experience, regardless of where they happen to be working on any given day. Here are six strategies to ensure your team members don’t feel overwhelmed or disconnected during the transition:

1. Supply Proper Equipment

Ensuring that your hybrid workforce members are prepared at all times is crucial for employees to work efficiently both inside and outside of the office. Make sure employees have a unified core of computing equipment, such as a laptop, docking station, and monitor if necessary. Understand what subsets of this equipment will be used in the various location profiles, and how this can impact their work experience; no one wants to have to carry a 24” monitor back and forth from the office to their home if they’re working out of both locations.

Collaborative work tools such as softphones or mobile cell-phones are also important considerations that will help employees stay in touch so they never feel disconnected from the corporate office. Deciding which to use ultimately depends on your existing communication infrastructure and the way your user groups prefer to communicate. Finally, leveraging a virtual desktop interface, or VDI, in conjunction with a tablet or BYOD computer provides a secure computing environment that is accessible from anywhere.

2. Evaluate Connectivity

Allowing remote workers to use consumer internet access, anyway they can get it, could be a huge risk to your organization. While most everyone has home internet these days, the fact that it’s so readily available suggests a multitude of problems for an organization’s corporate IT department. When a remote worker is connecting a company asset to an unsecured network, they are potentially exposing the information on their device to possible viruses or bad actors. This risk is exponentially higher for a hybrid work environment once the worker brings the potentially compromised device back into the corporate office, either physically or via remote access tools.

There are two primary ways to combat this risk as an IT department while still giving your employees robust connectivity while remote. The first is to provide managed connectivity through a cellular connection so all remote traffic is routed through a connection that you know and trust. This method can be expensive and might require specific equipment such as LTE-enabled laptops or the addition of mobile hotspots, but it isolates corporate equipment from ever connecting to other networks. The most common solution to help your hybrid workforce avoid this risk, without the larger costs of managed cellular, is by implementing and enforcing security policies and either physical or software gateways so your IT department can ensure that company data and user information is not compromised when using untrusted networks.

It’s also important to understand what obligations you have under employment law in your state. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, most states have passed laws that lay out the requirements businesses have for providing or reimbursing for home internet access. Need some help getting your hybrid infrastructure secured, optimized, and productive? Learn more about Bluewave’s technology evaluation services here.

3. Manage Employee Access

Now that you’ve got your connectivity in place, the next step is figuring out how to safely allow your employees to access corporate data resources while keeping them secured. IPSEC VPN is the traditional route when it comes to remote access, but this is sub-optimal technology in the age of Cloud SaaS; it puts extra strain on corporate networks, and provides a poor user experience for the employee. Businesses that have traffic profiles that include a large amount of Internet usage should consider using intelligent remote access clients to allow for application specific VPN tunneling and enable internet traffic tunnel splitting via cloud gateway.

In high remote work environments, this can reduce the burden on edge equipment by as much as 60 percent and improve web application performance for remote users by as much as 30 percent. By adopting a SASE architecture that includes a secure web gateway (SWG) and cloud-access security broker (CASB) for your remote workers, you can improve their experience, simplify your network, and improve your security posture end-to-end.

4. Implement “as-a-service” Tools & Platforms

Extending the connectivity and security necessary to make a hybrid work environment a success is only one piece of the hybrid worker empowerment puzzle. To fully undergo this transition, you will need to make sure you are providing the proper tools at the application layer as well. For some companies, that means providing a full Unified Communication stack; for those that already do, it means extending that UC solution into the mobile environment. This can be accomplished through implementing four main tools and platforms: instant messaging, mobile or softphone communication, virtual meetings/video communication, and through data-sharing and real-time collaboration. Unified Communications isn’t the only software toolset that you need to evaluate through the lens of hybrid work, but it is the one you need to address first.

5. Extend IT Support

Of course, implementing new tools and platforms that affect how an employee works will always require support from IT. In a corporate environment, questions are answered by walking over to the nearest IT tech or just asking a coworker. In a fully remote work environment, employees are left to figure an issue out on their own or undertake the arduous task of calling into the IT help desk. As the location of productivity changes, so does the way IT supports the work; distributed teams need an omni-channel support model that includes both asynchronous and real-time models. When implementing new support solutions, it’s important to consider looking at Managed Service Providers as a backstop to your existing IT team. An MSP can be an extension of your staff, bolstering your ability to support routine management and freeing your internal IT resources up for more strategic projects.

6. Determine Cost & ROI

Naturally, one of the most important factors that your organization considers when implementing new strategies is what the financial aspect will look like. While it does ultimately depend on the unique situation, Bluewave will help you evaluate not only the technical aspects, but also the business outcomes and ROI of choosing which path works best for you. In order to get a true understanding of what the costs will be, Bluewave works closely with our customers to obtain a full understanding of their existing costs for voice, data, conferencing, mobility, collaboration, and security. Once these expenses are fully understood, we can work together to save your organization both time and money.

Conclusion

Although implementing a new work model in this time of uncertainty can be daunting, it doesn’t have to be detrimental to your organization’s success. By supplying the right equipment, evaluating connectivity, and extending proper support, employees can be just as, if not more, productive when acting in a hybrid work environment. The first step is to hold a strategy session to determine where you should invest to get the most productivity out of this change and Bluewave can help you navigate your options, apply them to your unique business environment, and procure solutions at the most cost-efficient rate.

Let’s Get Started

Ransomware: What It Is, Who It Affects, and How It Can Be Prevented

Posted on August 5, 2021October 9, 2024 by Bluewave

Ransomware attacks are more common than people think and can affect anyone from small business to enterprises, and from privately owned corporations to the highest government entities.

Incidents that may seem distant and isolated often have catastrophic results for individuals located miles away from where the attack occurs. The Colonial Pipeline ransomware cyberattack affected several states on the East Coast of the U.S. when consumers found themselves with a major gas shortage for nearly a month.

This is just one example of how a ransomware attack can influence an unexpected number of individuals—so what exactly is ransomware and how can you prevent an attack?

The Growing Ransomware Threat

According to CISA (The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency), ransomware is a form of malware, or malicious software, that is designed to encrypt files on any given device, rendering both the files and device unusable.

Hackers that deploy ransomware often threaten to sell, leak or delete collected data if a ransom is not delivered. The payment for decryption of data is often demanded in a cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin or Ethereum for easy access. When Colonial Pipeline was attacked in early May, hackers requested 75 Bitcoin (or $4.4m) be paid within just hours of the attack. This resulted in a wave of repercussions that impacted both the U.S. Government and its citizens.

Ransomware is an Issue for Everyone

Ransomware may negatively affect large companies, but the problem doesn’t end there. Businesses of all sizes are struck by ransomware attacks both directly and indirectly. This was the case with The Kaseya Ransomware Attack that affected not only the software company itself, but many of the Managed Service Providers(MSPs) that utilize their software and the thousands of business customers that outsource these services to MSPs. Similar situations, where businesses were put at risk by third parties, arose with the SolarWinds exploit in 2020 and the Microsoft Exchange hack of early 2021.

No matter the size of an organization, a ransomware attack invariably leads to a number of negative outcomes such as:

Reputational damages
Massive financial loss
Deleted/Stolen files or critical data
Unforeseen company-wide downtime

Once the trust between a customer/client and a business is broken, it’s difficult to earn back—and the financial repercussions are often much worse.

Understanding Your Risk

Organizations that are most vulnerable to attacks, simply do not have a clear picture of their network and the attack surface. They are vulnerable to just about any kind of cyber attack, because often they don’t know how many open doors or windows they have in their organization.

The first step towards security is to conduct a thorough analysis of your network and map all of your devices, connection points, applications, databases, cloud and data providers and users
Bluewave’s Multi Layered approach to cybersecurity starts at the edge of the network and works inward to identify not just the usual attack points but also in more complex interactions between networks, employee behaviors, mobile devices, security/IT policies, and third-party vendors.
Additionally, a Bluewave telecom assessment can help gain visibility into your WAN assets and identify overspending within your existing budget to fund shoring up your cybersecurity posture.

Preventing a Breach

Active prevention is key in guarding against ransomware attempts. Here are a few strategies to consider when designing your network that help prevent future attacks:

Implementing deep packet inspection at the network edge.
Leveraging web security gateways to inspect traffic/content from all users, on all devices, from every location.
Incorporating mail inspecting services that block and remove emails and remote-activated attachments.
Adopting a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) model for all locations, including remote workers.
Securing and inspecting your applications and systems can also help fight against malicious content and prevent ransomware from spreading:
Implementing MFA (multi-factor authentication) to protect against password guessing and unauthorized access on your applications and SaaS
Using SSO (single sign-on) tied to a centralized Identity Management Platform to manage, track, and audit a user’s system access to easily follow principles of least privilege access.
Installing an Endpoint Protection Platform that leverages AI and machine learning (ML) to identify suspicious activity and to immediately enforce protection countermeasures against identified bad actors.
Aggregating all server, network access, and application logs into a Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) platform so security analysts have immediate access to critical forensic data to investigate anomalies in real time.

Cyber security is broad. Where do you invest to get the best use of your dollar? Find out how Bluewave can help you spend money wisely on the right security solution.

Hedging Your Risk

It is vital to be prepared for the possibility of an attack at all times too should a ransomware attack occur, which is why there are several key steps to take in order to minimize your risk:

Document where all of your critical data is stored and how that data is accessed.
Create offline backups that are kept separate from the main systems/networks on external hard drives, USBs, or a cloud service.
Identify critical assets and determine the business operational impact of a ransomware attack.
Develop internal and external communication strategies. During an attack, normal communication methods, like email, Slack, or MS Teams, may not be available to the team. Also, consider any legally required notification that you may be under.
Create an incident management plan that documents “first line of defense” steps and additional resources such as outside consultants and law enforcement whom you can bring in during an incident.
Clarify roles and responsibilities of all staff including executive management and legal counsel.
Conduct dry run exercises and war games so people can practice their incident procedures and gain the situational awareness needed to perform under pressure in the event of a live incident.

Responding to an Incident

Finally, and perhaps the most important to remember, are the four steps to take when responding to a ransomware attack that happened before prevention could occur:

Isolate: Immediately disconnect your infected computers, laptops, or other devices from all network connections. In a critical situation, consider turning off LAN switching and disabling all WAN network connections.
Mitigate: Work with your in-house security analysts, outside consultants, and law enforcement to identify which systems are infected, the method they were infected with, and if any back-up data has been compromised. Take needed steps to prevent reinfection once systems have been restored.
Inform: Use the previously identified legal obligations to report the incident to regulators and communicate the situation to staff, customers, and business partners as required.
Restore: Wipe infected devices thoroughly of all malware and restore systems and data from available clean backups. It is critical that before restoring files from backups, verify that they are completely clean, often ransomware will delay activation until a period of time after inflection to ensure backups are also infected and will be re-locked once restored. Finally, once you are confident the ransomware has been eliminated and normal data states have been restored, reconnect your systems to your LAN and WAN.

Preventing Ransomware

Ransomware attacks are becoming a common occurrence, but that doesn’t mean they are impossible to avoid. Through proper planning and preparation, prevention is possible. However, even with preventative measures, always having a response plan is the best way to ensure your company is prepared for any attacks a bad actor may throw your way. By implementing cohesive security services to inspect traffic and endpoints, as well as following industry standard security controls and policies, minimizing the likelihood of future attacks is more achievable now than ever before.

Let’s Get Started

The Three Technologies Businesses Need for a Smooth Remote Work Transition

Posted on August 1, 2021May 2, 2024 by Bluewave

The COVID 19 pandemic continues to rattle the world as we know it: people’s lives, businesses, the entire world’s economy, and everything in between. Terms that didn’t exist more than ten years ago like social distancing and working remote are household terms these days, and a handshake is suddenly the least desirable way to conduct business. It is imperative that companies leverage services that allow businesses to continue collaborating, serving customers, and communicating and operating effectively while remote. Remote work is here to stay.

Many IT folks are asked for a multitude of remote solutions from their employees. However, the majority of their employees aren’t entirely sure what they need; all they know is that they need it now. Many people are actively transitioning to working remotely, with little to no knowledge of what they need to be successful in doing it. While every end-customer is different, I’m seeing a general need for three specific technologies that are vital for remote work success: Unified Communications, Web Conferencing & Collaboration, and Virtual Desktops and Workspaces.

1. UCaaS for Remote Work

Basic voice communication is still the number one way many businesses reach out to their customers today. A full UCaaS solution will enable you to hold voice calls as your employee’s telework, hit the road, or wherever they might be. Businesses can use softphones on desktops, laptops, tablets, or even cellphones utilizing their corporate telephone number. Or of course, they can also use a traditional headset or handset. Many of these platforms also include many built-in collaborative tools, such as web conferencing, whiteboarding, instant messaging, knowledge-based systems, presence, and a whole lot more to allow people to interact with their fellow employees or collaborate with external customers.

2. Web Conferencing & Collaboration

When you want to see your teammates and communicate with them face-to-face, but in a safe way during the coronavirus, web conferencing is the perfect solution. This can be a quick add on for most businesses, whether you are using an on-prem voice system or a full UCaaS solution. But adding video capabilities can bring a great personal touch to remote meetings. Many also have built-in whiteboarding capabilities, webinar functions, the ability to share files, etc. Moreover, with collaboration, services such as Microsoft O365 and Teams can take an organization to the next level.

Microsoft Teams can help pull people together, not only within your organization, but also across the globe, giving them the ability to collaborate on documents, share files, plan projects, and more. Web conferencing allows many people to get together in an instant, and do more together, even when thousands of miles apart. Most UCaaS providers also tightly integrate with Teams. Plus, O365 and Teams run on almost any device: Windows, Mac, tablets, cell phones, etc. Flexibility and accessibility for remote work is great.

3. Virtual Desktops and Workspaces

People need desktops while working remotely. Many of our suppliers allow you to have an entire virtual desktop or workspace running remotely in the cloud, giving you access to your full corporate desktop experience anytime, anywhere. Remote desktops and workspaces can typically run on almost any device—Windows, Mac, iPads, Android devices, etc. This allows users that are teleworking to utilize the equipment they may already have at their home office. Also, many software packages today run across the web making teleworking much easier in the event you may not have a full virtual desktop provisioned. But integration with your voice and collaboration systems for many of these packages, such as Salesforce, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, and more allow a much richer experience for that remote worker. Especially advance-knowledge workers who interact with customers day in and day out.

IT executives are currently being inundated from various providers offering multiple solutions. It can be overwhelming, but we are here to help you navigate through the noise quickly to select the best solutions at the best price for your company. Also, many providers in our portfolio are offering complimentary services and special pricing as relief for businesses impacted by COVID-19 so we can help you take advantage of the many offers available for your business.

Let’s Get Started

Cyber Attackers are Exploiting New Remote Workforce Vulnerabilities, and Small Businesses are on the Hit List

Posted on July 24, 2021November 19, 2024 by Bluewave

Smaller companies have valuable information that cybercriminals want, and they typically don’t have the security infrastructure to withstand a data breach or ransomware attack. It’s time for businesses to assess their vulnerabilities and have a strategy in place to fight back. Let’s explore remote workforce vulnerabilities.

The danger of cyber attacks is well known and documented, with new stories almost daily about a high-profile company or government entity falling victim to a large data breach or ransomware demands. Many smaller businesses harbor a false sense of security, assuming that – while there are dangers lurking, most cybercriminals wouldn’t bother coming after them. But according to the U.S. Small Business Administration, small businesses are attractive targets because they have information that cybercriminals want, or, and they typically lack the security infrastructure of larger businesses.

And there are plenty of cybercriminals that feed off smaller ransoms, such as $50,000 or $100,000, in exchange for valuable data. The victim of a small-time thief, such as a gas station robbery, is still attractive to a certain type of criminal – and perhaps feels an even bigger impact than a large enterprise. Unfortunately, paying for cyber security feels a lot like paying for insurance: nobody wants to spend money on it until something bad happens. And by then, a lot of damage has been done.

Post-pandemic Era

In the post-pandemic, hybrid office / remote office IT environment, criminals are exploiting vulnerabilities in cyber security that are new to many businesses as they struggle to adapt. Now, businesses of every size face new challenges in keeping their networks, data, and employees secure while supporting a more distributed, ever-changing remote workforce. It can be overwhelming to not only understand what threats exist for a smaller enterprise, but also assessing your organization’s current risk level – and what should be done about the risks.

Rather than pretending the issue doesn’t exist, organizations need to get at least a baseline cyber security assessment that takes a holistic look at their existing on-premises infrastructure, cloud assets, data repositories, remote workforce, and IT policies. There isn’t a “one size fits all” strategy to staying safe in the digital age, and it requires looking at every business and technology process through a security lens.

Technology Assessments are Key

The Bluewave Technology Assessment can help fund these critical security needs. With our average 12.4x ROI on our assessment, your IT budget will have room to fund these security projects. And Bluewave can assist you in building the most cost-effective and reliable security system to meet the coming challenges.

Once an organization has had their current state assessed, they can take a layered approach to their cybersecurity defense by implementing a control framework, such as NIST. There have been many shifts in cybercriminal activity and strategies recently, with many new attack factors. It is past time for ALL organizations to put a strategy in place before they are the next victim.

If you are worried about remote workforce vulnerabilities, Bluewave can help you with these challenges.

Let’s Get Started

SD-WAN, SASE, and Network Infrastructure Planning

Posted on June 23, 2021November 19, 2024 by Bluewave

Does the choice of SD-WAN enable a better SASE architecture?

SD-WAN is an important part of SASE, but security has taken the more dominant focus during Covid.

Where does SD-WAN really stand?

‘Is SD-WAN an important first step to a SASE architecture?’ is a question I get asked often. Before Covid my answer was in many cases ‘yes’ but the landscape has changed a lot. The earlier drivers of SD-WAN were simple and compelling – to pull network infrastructure out of the dark ages and make it agile and cloud-ready. The technology benefits were an order of magnitude better when it came to performance, cost and manageability. The business case was straightforward, but the complexity lay in navigating the landscape of 50+ vendors possessing hugely varying capabilities.

Cloud-based applications like Office 365 and Amazon Web Services (AWS) were much faster with SD-WAN, primarily due to the ease of aggregating multiple dedicated internet access (DIA) and low-cost broadband connections at enterprise locations into a single, stable connection with ease and efficiency comes a potential security nightmare – necessitating a cloud-security strategy to be a parallel consideration to SD-WAN. But this was still relevant when the bulk of the workforce belonged in the office.

Was SD-WAN enough during Covid?

Covid shifted the IT focus from the office to the work-from-home user. Employees now needed complete networking and security capabilities for 24×7 access from home in all parts of the world. Most enterprise remote access infrastructures were designed to support a portion of a company’s workforce, and were simply not ready to handle the full corporate user base; this exposed several choke points in performance and security that left IT struggling to manage. Ransomware and other bold attacks on employees and corporations have been on a steep rise through Covid, seeking to exploit these gaps left from quick adaptation to the new normal. SASE is the starting point for an architecture that looks at networking and security in a more comprehensive manner.

Does SASE have more questions than answers?

While the enterprise need for SD-WAN could easily be solved by a single vendor, SASE is an overarching framework that may require multiple vendors. The approach of IT solutions for discrete user groups in isolated silos has to be done away with and needs to give way to ‘solving for a single hybrid user’ irrespective of their location. This makes the SASE transformation a journey of multiple steps, driven by many important questions.

Can hardware-based SD-WAN solutions still meet SASE needs?
Is there a recommended step-wise deployment for SASE?
Can all hybrid users come under a single Zero Trust Network Architecture (ZTNA) model?
How do the security solutions of SWG and CASB provide consistent protection for the WFH and enterprise users?
Is there a vendor that can deliver the major security blocks of CASB, SWG and FWaaS in a single, cloud-based solution?
Does SASE protect an enterprise from intrusion and phishing attacks?
Should SaaS optimization be executed by SD-WAN or the SASE cloud?

Does the Roadmap to SASE need to be bumpy?

In its report, Gartner highlights that SASE deployments are still in small numbers today and why it is a complex topic without a straightforward solution. For one of the few times I can remember throughout my years of enabling enterprise customers to solve their WAN and security challenges, we, as an IT community, have an opportunity to think holistically about network transformation. But, that opportunity isn’t without risk. More than once I have been called into situations where failure to plan or ask the right questions have led to wrong choices and some costly missteps. In a webinar Bluewave hosted with CATO networks, we break down the way an enterprise needs to analyze the SASE roadmap based on their unique requirements.

Let’s Get Started on Your SASE Solution Now!

How Telecom Billing Systems Work

Posted on May 11, 2021May 21, 2024 by Bluewave

Many people assume that a telecommunication service invoice should tell them how much they’re spending, what they’re paying for, and what services they currently have. The reality is that telecom invoices are designed to tell you the amount you owe, not why you owe that amount, making it all the more important to understand how telecom billing systems work.

A Quick Introduction to Telecom Billing

Even the phrase “telecom billing” means a lot of different things to different people. It isn’t easy to nail down, and it only gets trickier the deeper down the rabbit hole you go. To the IT team, telecom billing drives many of the decisions behind the technology they support. To the finance team, telecom billing is an overhead expense that needs to be closely monitored (but many lack the visibility to do so). To the executive, telecom billing means the cost of keeping the company connected. To the provider, it means how much you owe them.

See how each party brings a slightly different perspective to the table? That’s probably why it makes more sense to start with what telecom billing isn’t. Telecom billing isn’t your invoice. If you’ve ever tried translating your invoice into understandable language, you know that’s almost impossible. They don’t tell you why you’re being billed that amount, and no two ever look the same.

That’s why when you’re trying to make sense of telecom billing systems work, the last place to start is by sitting down and reading through pages of invoices. (Hint: you don’t have time for that, and automated systems can read them faster to identify errors than you can).

Instead, the best place to start is by understanding how the costs are calculated and what you’re paying for.

What Is a Telecom Billing System?

In the simplest terms, a telecom billing system includes all the policies, processes, and data a service provider relies on to calculate how much you owe them.

Each provider has a different way of calculating rates, billing, labeling rates, and naming fees. Even if you manage to make sense of one provider’s billing system, that rarely translates to clarity with other providers.

However, one thing all billing systems have in common is that they consist of many moving parts, including:

Billing and rating: A process managed by a billing engine called an Online Charging System (OCS) to calculate what you owe by converting call or usage data into a monetary equivalent.
Tariffs and fees: Each time you use a provider’s service, that service is subject to a predetermined surcharge, taxes, and additional service fees.
Disputes and adjustments: When discrepancies arise between what you paid and what you should have paid, any compensation is credited or debited to your account.
Discounts and prorating: Did the sales team promise you an incredible introductory rate? Maybe you opted out of a service that you already prepaid for. Those adjustments are reflected in your account balance.
Service changes: When you start, end, or switch services, the billing system factors in for those changes.
Payment processing: The system a carrier or provider uses to process and track your payments.

Starting to understand why telecom invoices aren’t as simple as a single number at the bottom of the page? There’s a lot behind that number, but telecom invoices aren’t designed to explain or even outline those determining factors.

Common Bill Cycles in Telecom

Along with the handful of factors dictating the final number that appears on your invoice, there are a number of different billing cycle options that affect your invoice, including

Prepaid Billing: With prepaid billing, you generally pay upfront to start using a service. In place of invoices, your account is charged in real time based on usage, and you get a statement of charges on an ongoing basis.
Postpaid Billing: Postpaid billing describes your conventional telecom billing option. You use services and are charged based on usage over a given billing cycle. At the end of the billing cycle, the provider’s telecom billing system generates your invoice and sends it to you. The most common bill cycles are 30, 45, 60, or 90 days.
Convergent Billing: Instead of separating each invoice by service, convergent billing consolidates some or all service charges into a single invoice, intended to provide companies with a unified view of billing over a given cycle. The reality of the situation is that convergent billing can further complicate an already confusing invoice.

Need to make sense of telecom billing? Our Technology Assessments make it easy. Discover how here.

How Telecom Billing Software Works

Telecom billing software works by connecting to a charging platform called an Online Charging System (OCS) that charges every transaction in real time. Whenever a device on your network interacts with the telecom system, the OCS tracks and records that interaction based on usage and interaction type (e.g., data usage, call minutes) as a Call Data Record (CDR).

Because data is recorded in real time, the chance of billing errors is reduced, but those numbers still need to be reconciled with the other billing factors outlined above in order to accurately determine what you owe.

With prepaid billing, the OCS charges your account in real time, and if you have a credit limit, you are notified when you’ve exceeded that limit as soon as it happens. You can then decide to add credit to your account or change services.

With postpaid billing, the OCS tracks your account balance, compiling an invoice over a given billing cycle while deducting or adding any discounts, taxes, and fees. You then receive that invoice at the end of the billing cycle, but just looking at the invoice, you may still not understand what you’re paying for, or more importantly, why you’re paying for it.

What Happens When You Don’t Know What You’re Paying For?

If telecom billing systems were easy enough to understand after reading a single blog, Bluewave wouldn’t exist. With the above information, you may be able to understand how your telecom invoices are calculated, but you probably still aren’t equipped to identify billing errors, eliminate redundant services, or even know what you’re paying for. When that happens, we can almost always guarantee you’re overpaying on underperforming technology.

Bluewave eliminates that problem with a technology assessment, and we promise you’ll learn a thing or two about telecom billing along the way. Send us a message when you’re ready to start saving and reinvesting those savings in higher priority technology initiatives.

Let’s Get Started