Payroll Software In The Cloud For Small Business

There’s a myth that’s grown up with cloud computing that suggests that the cloud only works for large companies. Nothing could be further from the truth. That story probably got started because major enterprises pioneered the move to the cloud. Today, the cloud is as much or more benefit to the SMB as to multinational corporations.

One good example is the SaaS (Software as a Service) Patriot Software. Patriot offers payroll software, tax filing, time and attendance, employee self-server, and human resources software for businesses operating with 50 or fewer employees in the United States. What all this software has in common is that it is hosted in the Patriot data center cloud, not on your PCs or local servers.

You don’t need IT infrastructure to run your payroll system. An Internet connected computer will give you the access to the cloud that you need. That means you aren’t stuck at a dedicated terminal or your desktop computer. You can take your laptop with you and run payroll from wherever you need to be at no additional charge.

Patriot PAY lets you pay your employees the way you want to. You can define your pay frequency, create an unlimited number of earning codes, define your overtime multiplier, and pay with multiple methods such as cash, handwritten checks, printed checks, direct deposit and payroll debit card. Create an unlimited number of user-defined deductions, such as medical, 401K, expenses, etc. Also create company match / contribution rules that can stand alone or be tied to deductions. All of this is done quickly, easily and securely online.

If you are running a small business, you may have gotten started with a manual system and then switched to a software package that runs on your PCs or servers. You know that there are costs above and beyond the initial cost of the hardware and software that is needed to keep your payroll system up to date. This can get into a considerable amount of labor to run nightly and weekly backups to protect your data, maintenance fixes and version upgrades to the software, loading new payroll tax tables and repair and upgrade of the computer equipment.

All of that grief goes away with cloud hosted solutions, also known as Software as a Service. The actual payroll software runs on a sophisticated cloud server system within the Patriot Software data center. All of the data and servers are housed in a SAS 70 Type II compliant facility that features redundant telecom backbones to the Internet, battery backup augmented by diesel generator backup, and full security. The operations center runs 24/7 to ensure that any problems are caught and fixed quickly. Most small companies have limited security on their systems and little or no support after business hours.

Besides physical security, there is electronic security to protect your data. In this case, Patriot Software uses secure socket layer (SSL) encryption just like banks and credit card companies. The data is protected by 256-bit encryption during transmission. The data servers that save your information are not directly connected to the Internet, so no one else can access your information unless they are physically standing in front of the servers.

What you need to ensure access to the system is a robust dedicated Internet access service with a second way to connect, wired or wireless, to ensure that you can get to the cloud when you need to. Everything else is provided for you on a cost per “seat” or “license” per month basis. This gives you the advantage of knowing your costs and buying only the level of service you need to support current business activity. When things pick up substantially, you simply add order up more capability from the cloud. There is no need to go out and invest in an expensive server system and software to run it just so you’ll have the capability when needed. Cloud services are on a pay as you go basis.

Patriot goes one step further by not requiring any long term contracts for their payroll system. If you want to cancel you can do that without penalty and go back to the way you did business before. Chances are, once you move to the cloud, you’ll like it enough to stay in the cloud.

Are you intrigued by this advanced approach to handling payroll but unsure if it’s for you? Try the system free for 7 days using a sample account pre-filled with sample data that you can experiment with. If you like the way it works, you can go ahead and become a customer. Otherwise, the sample account will be deleted at the end of the trial period and you own nothing. You don’t even need a credit card to give it a try. Go ahead and try Patriot PAY cloud-based payroll software now.

Symmetrical Internet Providers

Most people who use the Internet are consumers, not producers of content. The mix of content has migrated from largely text to largely images and streaming video over the last couple of decades. Even so, the connection arrangement for broadband Internet access has remained asymmetrical with bandwidth in the downward direction 5 to 10 times that provided in the upload direction.

Why is that the setup? Think about how you access the Web on a PC, tablet or smartphone. It almost always involves selecting some content to read or view. The selection process is a matter of mouse clicks or keyboard entry. Those are pretty low bandwidth activities. The viewing of the results or the acquisition of a file is just the opposite. A server assembles those results and delivers fairly large pages consisting of text, graphics, photo images and perhaps video. All of that material comprises a lot of bytes and needs a considerable bandwidth to deliver in any reasonable time.

Since bandwidth is a scarce commodity, relatively speaking, there is a noticeable cost involved in providing the wireline or wireless channel for transport. There is no point in provisioning a fast upload link if it is only going to be lightly used. It’s download that customers value and demand as much as they can get for their broadband dollar.

Social media is changing the mix of upload and download requirements. When most of us were web page readers, the low bandwidth upload and high bandwidth download channels were the obvious setup. Today, many more users are creators as well as consumers of content. They post to blogs and Facebook. They upload photos and videos as well as download them. New applications like VoIP telephony and video conferencing consume equal amounts of bandwidth in both directions. The pressure on service providers is for more upload bandwidth as well as download bandwidth.

Businesses have had the symmetrical bandwidth requirement for a long time. It’s the businesses that run those servers that provide content to their customers. Large files going to the server need lots of bandwidth. There may be more email flowing out of a business than into it. Some businesses are providing streaming video content to the Internet and consume more bandwidth in the upload direction than the download direction. Cloud services have heavy traffic moving in both directions.

Right now, your choices in Internet bandwidth services can be divided into symmetrical and asymmetrical categories. Symmetrical means that upload and download speeds are the same. Asymmetrical means one direction is much faster than the other. That’s almost always the download stream.

Traditional telecom services are symmetrical. They were developed by the telephone industry and later adapted for transporting data. Telephone is inherently two-way with no difference in the amount of traffic flowing in one direction versus the other. If you order a T1 line, Ethernet over Copper, DS3 connection or OC-3 fiber optic service, you will get symmetrical bandwidth by default.

Symmetrical bandwidth services also tend to be dedicated Internet services, abbreviated DIA for Dedicated Internet Access. What does dedicated mean? It means that the bandwidth is assigned exclusively for your use. A 10 Mbps EoC Internet service gives you 10 Mbps in both directions, called 10 x 10 Mbps, anytime you want to use it. Any bandwidth you don’t need at the moment sits idle until you do.

Symmetrical bandwidth services are often covered by Service Level Agreements or SLAs. These agreements spell out the technical characteristics of the line, such as bandwidth, jitter, latency and packet loss. They also define such things as MTTR or Mean TIme To Repair for any outages that might occur. There are generally remedies available, like refunds on your bill, if the service provider can’t deliver to the terms of the SLA.

Asymmetrical bandwidth services are generally targeted toward consumers where price is far more important than performance. The bandwidth is shared among multiple users, not dedicated to you alone. That means that your download and upload speeds will vary depending on how many others are trying to use the service at the same time. Instead of SLAs, asymmetrical services are provided on a “best effort” basis that lacks any guarantees.

There’s quite a difference in price and performance between symmetrical and asymmetrical bandwidth services. Which is right for your business? Get prices and features from business broadband Internet providers to compare options and select the best match for your company needs.

A Bottomless Battery For Your Smartphone and Tablet

Mobile technology is the way we stay connected on the go. WiFi hotspots combined with 3G or 4G cellular give us bottomless connectivity. Now if we only had bottomless power to go along with it.

The bane of any technology not tethered to a wall outlet is the battery. Batteries are always going dead long before the day ends. It’s bad news when you are out in the field or at the restaurant table without the wall outlet. When the power in your device fades, it’s lights out. This is why heavy users have taken to toting an external battery to recharge their fading device or substitute for the internal battery. The only problem is that if you are out and about long enough you end up with two dead batteries instead of one.

What you really need is a battery that never runs out of power. Wait! Why, that’s perpetual motion! It’s technical heresy!

No, it’s clever engineering. What Solio has done is create a battery that recharges itself. It’s not perpetual motion because it does draw in energy. It’s just doesn’t suck it from a wall socket. The Solio Bolt gets its charge from the Sun.

When you think of solar energy, you’re probably imagining an acre of mirrors in the desert or a field of panels on the roof of the office. Those are solar power, alright. They’re what’s called large scale solar. There’s also such a thing as small scale solar. It’s been pretty much ignored up to now as a niche technology suitable only for applications that need power at any price. Emergency phones, remote monitoring, satellites, and so on have used small scale solar power for decades. What’s new is the mashup of solar cells, a high capacity lithium battery and control electronics that’s small enough to fit in your pocket, yet powerful enough to completely recharge your smartphone or tablet.

The enabling technologies are high efficiency solar cells and a 2,000 mAh Li-Poly battery. Battery technology has really advanced since the days when all you could get was nickel cadmium cells that couldn’t hold much of a charge and died long before your calculator did. These new lithium based cells can disappear in the palm of your hand yet pack 2 Ampere hours of juice. That’s a lot of juice, electrically speaking.

So, here’s how it works. Everything’s contained in the palm-size plastic package. You swing it open about its central axis to reveal two solar panels. There’s a hole at the axis that is just the right size for a pencil. Stick in a pencil so that the Solio will be propped up and facing the Sun. Then do something else like eat lunch or read a book. While Solio is basking, the battery is quietly charging. No line cords required.

We got one of these at home. When it’s not needed, it hangs by a cord in a window. A red LED in the back lights to indicate that the battery is charging on solar power. You can push a button at any time to get a reading of how much charge it’s gained. One flash means 10%, two flashes means 20% and so on. Yes, it takes all day to fully charge in sunlight, but what else is it doing? Just leave the Solio where it can see the Sun and it will top off before you know it. No having to remember to plug-in to charge that battery. The crew at Solio puts theirs on an outside window ledge. They get more sunlight than through a window. You can use that pencil that’s propping the unit up as a sundial to aim for best exposure. When there is no line showing, the alignment is optimal.

The Solio Bolt comes with a USB connector that you can plug your iPhone or iPad cable into to grab a charge. There’s even a special Apple mode that optimizes charging for Apple products. Everything else gets standard USB charging rates. If you need to recharge your Solio fast or it’s dark outside (night owls) you can recharge the battery through a USB wall charger or from a laptop. Non-eco friendly but effective.

You might think that something like this would really work well in the bush and you’d be right. In fact, it is so ideal for remote areas like rural Kenya, that Solio runs a solar leasing business there. Now households can have power for lights, radios and cell phone charging and avoid burning kerosene indoors at night. It will work just as well at your fishing cabin or wherever you pitch a tent.

Have you seen the light now? Would this solution meet your needs? Learn more and get your Solio Bolt quickly and easily. For a bottomless battery, it’s eminently affordable.

3 Mbps to 6 Mbps Bonded Internet Access

Business Internet access is critical to communicating with customers and perhaps taking and fulfilling orders. You want rock solid stability and decent bandwidth, but at a price that won’t break the bank. Here’s a look at how you can incrementally increase your Internet connection speed to match your business activity.

Not that long ago, you had a couple of choices for dedicated Internet access. You could get a T1 line at 1.5 Mbps or move up to a T3 line (DS3 bandwidth) at 45 Mbps. There really wasn’t anything in-between. Shared bandwidth services offer a larger range of choices, but shared bandwidth means variable performance and assurance of availability. You also have to contend with asymmetrical speed, where download line speed is 10x the upload line speed.

Dedicated Internet access, like T1 and T3, offers symmetrical bandwidth that is the same for both upload and download, a fixed line speed that doesn’t vary, and high availability with a Service Level Agreement (SLA). The one issue is cost, especially when you need more than what a T1 line can provide but not the full capacity of a T3 line.

Sometimes you can get what’s called a fractional line service. The service provider installs a full capacity line, but rate limits your bandwidth. The result is referred to a fractional T3 or fractional DS3 service. It saves some money over the full service level but isn’t that great of a deal on a per Mbps cost basis.

A better option today is to order bonded line service to increase your bandwidth. Bonding is an industry standard for connecting multiple lines of the same type to combine their bandwidths. For instance, you can bond two T1 lines together and get 3 Mbps instead of 1.5 Mbps. The view from your router is one larger bandwidth service rather than juggling two separate lines. That bonding process takes place within the Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) that is installed by the service provider.

Bonding is a great way to increase your bandwidth incrementally, but there are a couple of things to consider. First, you can’t just go out and buy a second T1 line from just anybody. You have to get your bonded lines from the same carrier. Remember that it is the service provider who does the bonding through equipment at both ends of the line.

Also, the cost goes up by the same increment as the bandwidth. In other words, two T1 lines cost twice as much as one T1 line. There is no economy of scale. That’s no big deal if you are happy with doubling your line speed and your cost versus have to pay 10x the price to move up to the next standard line speed increment of T3. However, this technique does get less attractive with the more lines that you bond in.

Yes, you can go beyond double bonded T1. Bond three T1 lines for 4.5 Mbps, four lines for 6 Mbps, 5 lines for 7.5 Mbps, 6 lines for 8 Mbps, 7 lines for 9.5 Mbps or 8 T1 lines to get 11 Mbps. By the time you get 8 T1 lines bonded, the cost may be approaching what you’d pay for 45 Mbps T3 and you’d have a lot higher line speed.

There is an alternate bonded line service that may give you more bandwidth for less money. This is Ethernet over Copper or EoC. Like bonded T1, EoC uses multiple wire pairs to transport the signal. Providers will bond 2, 4, 6 or 8 pair to increase the speed of Ethernet over Copper service. Unlike T1, EoC offers a much wider range of available bandwidth options. For the price of a T1 line, you can get 2 or 3 Mbps EoC. Other speed options include 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 and 45 Mbps. Cost per Mbps actually decreases as you order higher bandwidth levels.

The one limitation of Ethernet over Copper is availability. It is a newer service and not all central offices are equipped to provide this line service. Also, EoC is highly distance sensitive. You need to be close to your CO to get the highest speeds. Otherwise you may top out at 10 or 15 Mbps. That’s still about the best you can do with bonded T1 and for considerably less cost.

Are you looking for a rock solid connection to the Internet to support your business activities. If so, check availability and pricing for bonded T1 and EoC dedicated Internet access options.

Getting Network Connections Into Europe

While many companies need only domestic WAN connections to run their businesses, an increasing number need links to other parts of the world. European markets are especially important for financial trading and sales & support within the EU. The question is how domestic US organizations get connected into Europe and how they do that cost effectively.

The good news is that there are a number of carriers that span the Atlantic and offer connectivity into major European cities. Some American-based carriers have arrangements to hand off traffic to data centers in Europe. AboveNet recently announced just such an arrangement with ancotel GmbH of Frankfurt, Germany.

Hooking up with ancotel’s Kleyer 90 data center gives AboveNet access to more than 430 service providers who represent 63 countries. These include bandwidth services, VoIP providers, hosting companies, content delivery networks and cloud networking. About 75% of the traffic that goes in and out of the Frankfurt data center is routed to destinations outside of Germany.

In addition, Frankfurt itself is a major financial hub for Europe. AboveNet specializes in low latency connections that support high speed trading. They offer a Gigabit Ethernet service between New York and London with the extreme low-latency needed for algorithmic trading and the secure completion of financial and banking transactions. AboveNet’s low-latency transatlantic service reaches the key financial locations in London including, Slough, The City and Docklands. In the New York Metro area, they connect you with Manhattan and New Jersey, including Newark, Weehawken, Secaucus, Carteret and Clifton. Metro access under 1 msec to hundreds of buildings in the New York and London metro markets.

Another carrier with a global reach is Level 3 Communications. They have multiple fiber optic connections from the New York metropolitan area cross the Atlantic and landing in England, France, Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands. From there, fiber networks connect to Germany, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Finland and other European destinations. They have an extensive network covering North America, so that your traffic is on-net even if you aren’t located on the East Coast.

Global Telecom and Technology also has extensive network connectivity in the United States and Europe. They have access to over 100,000 point of presence (POPs) worldwide and experience with installing networks in over 80 countries. GTT offers both international WAN connectivity and International Dedicated Internet Access (DIA).

What kind of international connectivity can you expect to find? The classic solution is a point to point telecom connection running over fiber optic undersea cable. At the low end are T1 lines in the United States and E1 lines in Europe. These run at 1.5 Mbps and 2 Mbps respectively. Faster services are the SONET/SDH fiber optic connections from OC-3 at 155 Mbps on up to OC-192 at 10 Gbps and perhaps OC-768 at 40 Gbps. Network cores are currently being upgraded to 100 Gbps. An alternative service is Carrier Ethernet at 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps. Ethernet can be configured as a point to point dedicated line or a point to multipoint connection to link multiple locations.

MPLS networks are becoming increasingly popular for international network connections. You can interconnect all your domestic business locations with a mesh network connection running over MPLS. That MPLS network can also include locations in Europe or elsewhere across the globe. What MPLS offers is high performance, security and lower costs than multiple point to point line connections.

Does your business need access to Europe to include sales, distribution or manufacturing? Do you perhaps have special requirements such as high bandwidth or ultra low latency for financial services? If so, there are telecom services available to meet your needs. In many cases, you can get multiple competitive bids for international network connections and choose which carrier to do business with.