A Letter From Our CTO

To eliminate the instability challenges we had last year, the following is an update on work done since then:

Improved our monitoring system.
We have enhanced our existing monitoring with PRTG. Our staff, including a PRTG Specialist, has done a wonderful job of configuring and maintaining PRTG. We have made further investments in our NOC including large screens that are updated in real-time and provides audible and visual alarms. Our 24 hour email alert system is now reaching more staff in various time-zones. This monitoring system has already proved itself many times as it catches anomalies very fast and allows us to react very quickly before service impacting issues occur.

New servers and network equipment:
We purchased and deployed new servers to be used as vHosts. Bought and deployed new network switches and upgraded our firewalls and tested both locations to confirm firewalls work in H/A mode. Both of our main colocation facilities provide HSRP/VRRP redundant Internet feeds which we have verified and thoroughly tested. As part of this infrastructure effort we have thoroughly reviewed all of our services and related components. Where needed we added additional redundancy, provided more resources and tested and confirmed redundancy under full load.

Improved portal resiliency by incorporating cloud (AWS):
This simplifies our redundancy situation in case that one of our main co-locations fails. This allows the portal to connect to our failover site and services within a few minutes. In case of an AWS failure we have redundant portals in each of our co-location facilities. We’ve also added additional mail servers; this change makes it easier for us to ensure that the portal’s email is fully redundant.

Improved Carrier routing:
We have additional carriers so now have multiple carriers for US and Canadian Local DIDs as well as Toll Free numbers. This provides, where needed, redundant inbound trunks that we can configure remotely with intelligent call routing. We have also added additional routes to our outbound faxes to provide better coverage when sends fail. In adding new carriers we go through a rigorous quality assessment and testing, plus collaborating to refine settings and routes before including them to ensure they meet our high standards.

Hired additional staff:
We have added new staff members and re-organized our support team structure. We’ve also provided additional cross training of staff so they can help resolve issues quickly. The new staff has allowed some of more experienced staff to focus on analysis and testing of our systems to ensure quality services are maintained at all times. As part of our staff training we have now also improved our emergency response process. This also includes faster updates on our website support bulletins and RSS feed by our CSRs in parallel with the technical efforts of our support team. Customers who call us will now get updates via our phone system when there are issues.

Upgraded our Software:
We have worked with our existing vendor partners to improve redundancy and provide additional services. We have newer versions of code in our core fax products. We’ve built a new RESTful API to better integrate with CMR, EMR/EMH, Pharmacy, Legal and Financial systems.
Improve our porting process
We are aware that the porting process is manual and could be improved. Up until recently our providers were the bottleneck. We have done a lot of work with our providers to speed up this process and can say that this part of porting is now much better. Next we are looking at providing you, our resellers, with some better tools from our side to improve this process even further and ultimately automate.

Regards,
Chem Cohen, CTO