When you think about technology challenges, you might think it’s about headaches that the IT team has to deal with. But in our era of digital transformation where technology powers and permeates every aspect of an enterprise, technology issues affect how businesses operate, scale, and remain competitive.
The voice and connectivity infrastructure, in particular, matter more than ever. The current environment businesses are operating - and looking to expand - in is characterized by:
Let’s take a look at seven of the most prevalent voice and connectivity issues that hound enterprises today.
Any organization that has been around for any length of time likely has a communications infrastructure that has evolved to include a mix of legacy phone systems, standalone cloud apps, disparate carriers, site-specific network setups, or some combination. Over time you end up with an overall environment that’s stitched together rather than intentionally designed. This can result in:
And the pain only grows as the organization expands, more remote workers are added, and business requirements evolve.
Solving this starts with creating a more unified foundation for voice, data, and collaboration services—consolidating carriers, standardizing platforms, and adopting centralized management tools to enforce consistent policies, improve quality of service, and streamline support. This provides a clearer path to scaling, whether that’s adding new offices, integrating acquisitions, or supporting a distributed workforce.
For many organizations, the best way to achieve this is through managed connectivity and voice services. Either way, by reducing the number of moving pieces and bringing communications under a more cohesive framework, you can improve reliability, simplify operations, and create a stronger experience for employees and customers alike.
⬇️ See how Merlin Entertainments unified its scattered voice systems into Microsoft Teams Phone
Unplanned outages remain one of the most disruptive issues for businesses, whether they stem from carrier failures, hardware aging out, misconfigured routes, connectivity bottlenecks that only show up under load, or something else.
As more applications move to the cloud and more employees work remotely, even brief downtime can halt operations, delay customer interactions, and overwhelm IT teams with support tickets. Many organizations also lack redundancy in their voice or network paths, meaning a single point of failure - at a data center, an ISP, or a local circuit - can take entire locations offline.
Improving reliability starts with building resilience into the communications stack. Companies are increasingly adopting multi-path connectivity, diverse carrier options, and managed failover to keep services running even when one component breaks. Proactive monitoring and centralized network oversight help IT teams detect issues quickly and address them before they escalate.
Standardizing configurations, modernizing legacy infrastructure, and reducing the number of unmanaged vendor handoffs also make environments more stable. By designing networks and voice systems with continuity in mind - not just capacity - you can sharply reduce the risk of downtime and keep critical operations accessible around the clock.
Rising security threats is one of the most common and potentially costly IT issues that both small and enterprise-scale businesses encounter. Security threats come in many forms and hackers use all sorts of tactics - malware, phishing, and more - to breach companies’ IT systems. According to IBM, the global average cost of a data breach is a whopping $4.4 million.
Another study by Microsoft that focused on cyberattacks specifically within SMBs found that the average total cost of an attack is $254,445, but ran as high as $7 million. Sometimes, smaller companies cannot absorb the impact, which leads to their untimely closure. But security isn’t the only challenge. Regulations designed to safeguard data and privacy create requirements you are obligated to meet—and non-compliance can result in expensive fines.
IT teams have their hands full trying to keep pace with security and compliance, but voice environments can sometimes be overlooked in these plans, leaving gaps such as unencrypted call paths, unmanaged SIP trunks, or outdated carrier connections. At the same time, distributed workforces and hybrid networks make it hard to maintain visibility into how data moves across sites, clouds, and providers. The result is a higher risk of fines, service disruption, and reputational harm when an issue inevitably surfaces.
Addressing these risks requires a more deliberate and unified approach to how voice and network services are designed, monitored, and secured. Organizations are increasingly moving toward managed communications infrastructures that combine compliant connectivity, controlled routing, proactive monitoring, and built-in security safeguards.
⬇️ Watch to see how Microsoft Teams Phone can meet compliance needs and unlock advanced capabilities
Chances are, you’re under pressure to reduce costs wherever you can - especially telecom and network costs, which can be a significant portion of your overall technology budget. But if you’re like most businesses that are balancing legacy systems with more modern cloud-based services, you may very well be paying for duplicate circuits, underused voice services, or bandwidth that no longer matches actual demand. Add that to hidden fees, auto-renewed contracts, and limited visibility across multiple carriers, and you are potentially spending way more than you need to.
Monthly technology bills are often inscrutable, making it hard for IT professionals, let alone accounts payable teams, to understand what they are really paying for and everyone spends too much time every month dealing with these bills. And the more environments become distributed - across locations, remote workers, and cloud workloads - the more likely that total cost of ownership creeps up without anyone noticing.
The first step in getting your arms around all of this chaos is to get a clear picture of what services you’re being billed for, how they’re being used, and where there is waste that can be cut by rightsizing circuits, retiring outdated services, renegotiating contracts, and overall aligning costs with real business needs. At the same time, modernizing voice and data infrastructure, standardizing across locations, and using managed services to fill skill gaps can also lower operational overhead.
This kind of technology expense optimization builds an environment that isn’t just less costly, but is predictable, scalable, and financially sustainable over the long term.
Expanding into new regions or supporting a growing number of distributed sites often exposes the limits of a company’s communications and network architecture, particularly if you’re scaling globally. Different countries may require different carriers, regulatory approvals, or on-site hardware, which can create inconsistent performance and support experiences. Local providers can vary widely in provisioning timelines, potentially impacting your expansion plans, and in reliability, creating operational friction. All of this makes it difficult to maintain consistent voice quality, network performance, and security standards across all locations.
The key to smooth scaling is standardizing the design, deployment, and management of connectivity and communications across domestic and international sites. It requires a centralized model executed by global partners that can support your footprint with unified management, simplified provisioning, consistent policy enforcement, and comprehensive visibility. This allows you to scale with confidence and avoid the performance and operational issues that often accompany international growth.
⬇️ Watch to see how to scale Teams Phone across countries and deliver global telephony
Migrating voice systems - for example, to Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, or a cloud contact center - can quickly become a complicated, time-consuming project. Organizations often underestimate the dependencies between existing phone systems, network capacity, call routing, and endpoint devices. Without careful planning, migrations can cause dropped calls, poor call quality, or interruptions to critical business operations. In addition, coordinating between multiple vendors and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements adds another layer of complexity that can overwhelm IT teams.
A successful migration requires a structured approach that looks at the entire environment, not just the target platform. You need to assess network readiness, standardize endpoints, and create clear migration phases that minimize disruption. Centralized management and monitoring help track progress, quickly address issues, and validate call quality across locations. By planning carefully, testing extensively, and consolidating vendor interactions, you can make the transition smoother, maintain service continuity, and fully realize the benefits of modern collaboration and contact center solutions without adding unnecessary operational risk.
Many organizations struggle with limited visibility into their voice and network environments, which can lead to a lot of time spent fire-fighting problems that are only discovered after users report them. This makes troubleshooting slow and inefficient, and it can mask underlying issues that gradually erode service reliability. Fragmented tools, multiple vendors, and lack of centralized reporting further complicate the picture.
Improving visibility starts with centralizing monitoring and management across all communications and network services so you can identify trends, anticipate issues, and address problems before they affect users. Proactive management, combined with standardized policies and clear performance metrics, allows you to optimize resources, plan capacity, and maintain consistent service quality. With better insight into how systems are performing, you can reduce downtime, improve user experience, and make technology investments more effective.
You don’t have unlimited IT resources. And your IT team has only so many hours in the day. To get the most value from your voice and connectivity infrastructure, you need to reduce complexity, costs, and risk while at the same time evolving with business needs and technological advancements. It’s a lot. And it’s why Pure IP, a BCM One Company, has built a portfolio of communications and connectivity solutions. We solve these technology challenges every day for customers that range from SMBs to global enterprises and everything in between across a wide range of industries.
Contact us today and tell us what your most pressing technology issues are - let’s discuss your options and how we can partner to help solve them.