White Papers
Gain detailed information on the technologies, products and services that will help you make informed decisions about your telecom needs, future and security. Qwest's white papers give ample information for you to be knowledgeable when conversing with colleagues and your Qwest representative about important choices and solutions.
Best Practices for Proactive Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
How to plan, implement and execute a quick recovery strategy for local accidents and natural disasters
Today's unpredictable world puts pressure on IT departments to maintain business continuity in the face of many challenges. Natural disasters, network outages, cybercrime and security breaches can bring business to a halt if a company lacks a sound disaster recovery plan. However, with the right people, processes and technologies in place, companies can withstand and recover from even the biggest threats. In this paper, Dusty Williams, CIO of restaurant conglomerate OSI Restaurant Partners, LLC, and Mike Cybyske, CBCP, Manager for Qwest Disaster Preparedness, review their experience with implementing disaster recovery plans in their organizations and best practices for maintaining business continuity in the face of natural or man-made disasters. View
Connecting to Better Customer Service
Does your company have what it takes to succeed?
To excel in today's business environment, executives must understand the opportunities and challenges of customer service. Today's organizations must embrace innovation, achieve a high level of responsiveness and transform customer information and feedback into actionable results. View
Contact Center: Hosted Solutions
Why Hosted? Go Beyond the Traditional Contact Center
The contact center today is characterized by a conflict between its history and its current capabilities. Many businesses are discovering that making traditional premises-based solutions support new sophisticated customer contact management requirements entails a considerable amount of time, capital expense and expertise. As a result, companies and government agencies looking for a way to benefit from the powerful new contact center systems are turning to hosted contact center solutions. View
Do More with Less
How Service Providers Can Help Consolidate IT Expenses
CTOs know that today, when it comes to IT, more is no longer better. IT departments in every industry are faced with static or shrinking budgets and the mounting pressure to do more with less. To reduce operating expenses and network spending, they must find ways to maximize their current investments rather than make new ones. Opportunities for outsourcing infrastructure and applications management, WAN optimization, cloud hosting and software as a service (SaaS) are now available and can help IT departments meet their budgetary requirements for 2009. View
Electronic Health Records
Helping healthcare practitioners understand the benefits of implementing a system
A provision in the federal stimulus act is expected to transform the healthcare industry because of financial incentives for practices to improve the way medical records are stored. Here's how Electronic Health Records will help make your operations stronger and improve patient care. View
Ethernet for Financial Services
Metro Optical Ethernet for Financial Services
Financial services firms continue to offer more feature options, and more sophisticated, online transaction capabilities to differentiate themselves and enable their customers to access account information and transact business whenever and from wherever they choose. For example, to reinsert the personal service that the industry was based on, new "click to talk" options allow customers to access a live representative from within a Web portal, putting additional demands on connectivity requirements. Given the rapid adoption of these services, it's no surprise that the Meta Group estimates that a network outage can cost a financial institution more than $1.5 million per hour in lost revenue. View
Ethernet for Healthcare Providers
Metro Optical Ethernet for Healthcare Providers
BCDR, EMR, CPOE, PACS, ERP, RFID, and HIPAA1 are part of an alphabet soup of acronyms for technologies and regulations that are changing the way healthcare is delivered, and helping save lives. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has been in place for several years, yet many healthcare providers remain uncertain about what is necessary to ensure full compliance. This uncertainty affects systems and practices, but also affects data security and the sheer amount of data that flows between locations in a healthcare organization. View
Ethernet for Manufacturing
Metro Optical Ethernet for Manufacturing
PLM, SPC, FMS, SCADA, WIP, and MES1 are all part of an alphabet soup of technologies that have changed the way companies in the manufacturing sector do business. ISO 90012 compliance influences the sheer amount of data that manufacturers must maintain to document processes. Yet a divide between enterprise systems and the factory floor still makes process improvement difficult. Secure, reliable high bandwidth connectivity between systems and across the company-wide network can help manufacturers bridge that gap to become more efficient, more competitive, and thus potentially more profitable. View
Ethernet for the Public Sector
Metro Optical Ethernet for the Public Sector
As with many organizations today, institutions in the public sector are rapidly adopting new online, self-service applications for citizens and employees, to add convenience, meet the demands of elected officials, and improve efficiency. One state recently introduced a separate Web site and set of online tools to help the uninsured find discounted healthcare. At the opposite end of the spectrum, public safety agencies demand connectivity with each other and with government databases that help them do their jobs more effectively. All of these applications consume bandwidth at an ever-increasing rate. View
Healthcare IT Security Necessity
Leveraging technology to serve patients requires an investment in IT security and risk management. Qwest's security solutions help protect you from dangerous viruses, spam and other threats reaching your business with state-of-the-art firewalls, disaster prevention, recovery products and on-demand audit reports. View
Infrastructures for Innovation
Voice and network services can be leveraged to drive innovation
Advanced communications services are the backbone of effective customer experiences, providing businesses with quick, efficient and cost-effective ways to reach out and respond to clients and prospects. Companies that are still investing see enabling convergence, increasing scalability, and expanding application and information access as efforts that are both vital to opening new frontiers for the business and doing away with the unnecessary costs of legacy environments. View
Managed Security for a Not-So-Secure World
CIOs must manage security risks while addressing business needs and focusing on revenue-generating activities. This paper offers a strategy for providing data security and protection that addresses the rising data threat landscape, the need for compliance, and today's lean IT staffs. View
Mobile Security: The Essential Ingredient for Today's Enterprise
With a growing universal mobile workforce, it's important to understand the challenges and misconceptions about security in terms of complacency, cost, experience and do-it-yourself security management. Having a mobile security program that incorporates a trusted managed-security provider is a best business practice and an essential ingredient in protecting today's enterprises. View
Mobility
Stay Connected - Embrace Mobility at Your Business
Whether they're in an airport, hotel, or even at home, employees need to be as connected to your customers and business partners as they are in the office. View
Network Management Services: A Cost-Effective Approach to Complexity
Inside the networked enterprise, data streams are purchase orders, invoices, design specifications, online transactions, and customer service interactions that must flow across the network reliably, securely, and in real time. To support these mission-critical enterprise networks, enterprises are looking at alternative delivery models. Network management services can help companies reduce the overall cost of network operations and acquire the expertise needed to manage network complexity. View
Optimizing Your Communications in a Recession
How to drive operational efficiencies with communications solutions and technologies
As companies struggle to be profitable, the right communications technologies and strategy can be a big factor in achieving their budget goals. This paper takes a look at how to best optimize communications during a recession by using IP telephony, wireless technology and conferencing solutions to drive greater business value and productivity on a minimal budget. View
Plan for Success
How can SMBs effectively invest in technology during a downturn?
A recent business news story on the recessionary environment reported that "fear" is now running the show in this country. That fear-factor sentiment is pervasive in "doom and gloom" stories that dominate daily U.S. news. Everyone is fearful, and challenges abound for all businesses, including many of the nation's Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs). But with history as a guide, it's important for businesses to attempt to transcend the anxiety and uncertainty, and view a downturn as an opportunity to invest in future success. View
Plan for Success
Tips to help you achieve your goals in the new year
As the calendar changes, renewed optimism grows around the possibilities the new year may bring. And with some planning now, you can set yourself up to make those possibilities probable. View
Productivity
Getting More from Your Resources - Using Communications to Maximize Your Productivity
With business moving faster than ever before, boosting productivity is not just a competitive advantage. It is the key to the survival of many small and medium-sized businesses. View
Protecting Payment Card Data
Considerations for Achieving and Maintaining On-Going PCI DSS Compliance
Businesses managing payment card data face tremendous security challenges. The cost of a security breach can be devastating in terms of lost revenue, legal costs and damaged reputation. In fact, the payment card brands may even stop a business from processing credit card and debit card payments from customers.
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) provides a blueprint for building and maintaining a secure data network; however, implementing the policies, people, processes and technologies to achieve and maintain PCI compliance can be overwhelming. This paper provides some background about PCI DSS and its effectiveness and explains how enlisting experts to help execute your strategy can be the best way to achieve and maintain on-going compliance. View
Remove Boundaries to Evolve Business
Staying competitive in today's constantly changing business environment is an ongoing challenge. And these challenges expand as it becomes harder to engage in real-time interactions with colleagues and project teams who are likely spread across disparate locations. Focusing your IT staff on projects that enhance your core business expertise, while bringing external value-added services inside, makes removing the boundaries that hinder doing business anytime, anywhere a reality—instead of a want-to-have capability. View
Security Strategies for Converged Networks
Considerations for building a secure enterprise network infrastructure
A major trend in enterprise networks, convergence stands to enable tremendous productivity gains and efficiencies in enterprise IT departments. However, merging previously disparate networks and applications can pose significant security risks. In preparing for convergence, enterprises need to look ahead, assess potential risks and take a holistic approach to building security into the network infrastructure. View
The “Three Ps” of Evaluating Managed Network Services
The economics and complexity of managed services works to encourage mid-sized companies to narrow their search to suppliers that marry their deep network expertise with those of one or more key partners to provide a strong, integrated product portfolio supported by standard operational processes and systems throughout the entire lifecycle. View
The Innovation Quotient
Why investing now in data, voice, and networking services makes sense
In a 2009 survey conducted for Qwest by Fortune Custom Publishing and IDG Research Services, a majority of IT and business managers believe that spending on voice, data, and network services in difficult times can help companies meet their business objectives and gain an edge for future competition. Half expect such investments to leave them better prepared to compete when the economy recovers. View
Unified Communications and Your Business
The Myths, the Market Drivers and What You Need to Know
To create a consistent, seamless Unified Communications (UC) experience across your organization, you must first examine your existing infrastructure and business processes to determine what components will work best for your business. What processes are you trying to streamline or simplify? How can UC make your business run more smoothly and your workers be more productive? Do you have the right infrastructure in place to accommodate the applications and services that will benefit your business the most? This paper provides an overview of the potential benefits of UC and discusses some key considerations you should keep in mind when mapping out your UC strategy. View
Unleashing the Power of Customer Data
Most companies are swamped by feedback from their clients.
The real challenge is making good use of what they're trying to tell you. Building a customer-centric company requires a determination to collect customer feedback, analyze it rigorously, and, most importantly, change the way you do business in response to what customers tell you. View
What is a Router?
They still forward packets, but today's routers from Cisco and others are more about applications and services. Qwest's Eric Bozich, vice president product managment, weighs in. View
Worry-free Network
IT professionals need the capability to simplify their infrastructure in order to facilitate better ways of delivering services to their end users, and the level of proficiency needed to keep up with network technology has escalated. To ensure your IT resources stay focused on the critical, strategic projects that promote competitive advantages, consider the benefits of managed service providers. View
Free Webinar:The Road to 2010:
What's Your IT Plan?
Learn how service providers like Qwest are responding to these immediate, real-world challenges to assist your company.