Most Businesses Use IT Managers To Handle Telecoms

A new piece of research has found that IT managers are now responsible for their organisation's telecoms in over half of the businesses which were questioned.

To be precise, the study which was conducted by business net and comms service provider Timico found that 52 per cent of organisations said that voice communications was the responsibility of their IT manager – as opposed to a dedicated member of staff (and possibly supporting employees) handling the job.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the survey, though, was the ignorance on the telecoms front which was revealed with several questions. 35 per cent of respondents admitted they didn't know whether their firm used a single network for voice and data, and 54 per cent of IT managers were totally unaware of the existence of PBX phone fraud and the dangers of their system being hacked and abused by malicious parties.

Charlie Whelpton, Director of Unified Communications at Timico, commented: "The line between IT and telecoms has become so blurred that telecoms management is often falling onto the shoulders of IT managers, especially in SMBs."

"In many cases, IT managers are already facing demanding and complex workloads, so adding telecoms is an added strain on resources. This not only means that IT managers could be missing out on the best deals – like migrating to SIP instead of relying on IDSN lines – but could also open businesses up to dangerous and costly mistakes, like PBX phone hacking."