On Ramps That Improve Cloud Performance

By: John Shepler

IT infrastructure is now key to your business. It’s a lot more than a few servers in a closet down the hall these days. Chances are that you are using Software as a Service (SaaS) running on popular public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure plus your own private data center. What once was an easy interconnect to everything on a company LAN is now a worrying mix of local and remote connections. Are you stuck with performance that varies constantly and nightmares of security breaches, or is there a much better solution?

Weak Links In The Chain
When equipment or services are remotely located, the first thing everybody thinks of is connecting through the Internet. Broadband is readily available nearly everywhere and very reasonably priced. This is especially true if you just connect through a Cable broadband service. Reliability of HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) networks has gotten very good and prices are as low as you’ll find.

The massive adoption of consumer broadband is what has kept prices low even for business broadband. The tradeoff is that you are sharing that connection with dozens or even hundreds of other users. You can’t see them, but you can feel the effect as the Internet speeds up and slows down.

Dedicated Access Improves Performance
The Internet is an amazing data superhighway, but the on and off ramps are where a lot of the congestion is. A good solution is get a private ramp, called Dedicated Internet Access or DIA, between you and your Internet service provider. This is most likely a fiber Ethernet connection but could be Fixed Wireless as long as the path you are using is dedicated for your use only.

Why Not All Private Access?
The next step up is a completely private line from your local network to your cloud service provider. Once again, this would be a fiber optic Ethernet running 100 Mbps to 100 Gbps with guaranteed performance. This is like having your own highway with no traffic other than your company data. It’s the closest thing to a LAN that stretches across the country to include your cloud services.

The drawback to dedicated private lines is the cost, as you might suspect. There is no one else sharing the pipe, so there is no one else helping to pay for it. You have all the bandwidth and the security of a walled-off connection, but you have all the costs too.

An intermediate solution that maintains connection performance and offers high security over long distances is the MPLS network with dedicated access lines. The MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching network is a private Wide Area Network with costs that are shared among many subscribers, but with performance guarantees instead of the “best effort” you get on the Internet. Security is better than the Internet because the network uses a proprietary label switching protocol and not the easier to hack TCP/IP.

Move Next Door To Really Improve Performance
Remember how easily it was to get all the network performance you needed when everything was in the same building and all you needed was runs of Ethernet cabling? You can replicate that by choosing to move your equipment to a colocation center that also houses your software service providers or has dedicated cloud on-ramps.

This is an example of a hybrid cloud. Your servers and storage are in racks in the colo building that supplies power and cooling. It also has direct cable or fiber connections to service providers housed in the same building. Other direct connections go to points of presence for large public cloud services that are located in multiple data centers around the world. By accessing one of these cloud on-ramps you avoid the vagaries of the Internet and connect your private cloud to their public cloud to create the hybrid cloud arrangement.

Of course, this can be expanded to include multiple services providers as long as they have a physical presence or on-ramps available in the data center. Connect to as many as make sense to create a multi-cloud that give you all the services you need. The connection to your business is then through a dedicated private line or Dedicated Internet Access from your colocated equipment back to your offices. This is considerably more cost effective than having many dedicated private lines to widely scattered service providers.

Do you need higher performance than your current connections can provide or have a requirement to interconnect multiple service providers? If so, find out what mix of dedicated, dedicated access and cloud on-ramps would work best for your company.

Encrypted Wavelengths Offer High Bandwidth and High Security

By: John Shepler

With data security becoming more and more of an issue, every weak link in the IT infrastructure needs to be identified and hardened. If your network extends beyond your premises, like most every one does, those MAN and WAN connections represent a vulnerability that has to be addressed. A relatively new service does that now for very high bandwidth users. It’s called Wavelength Encryption or Encrypted Waves.

Security of Dedicated Lines
The vulnerability of your connection can vary dramatically, depending on how your packets are getting from point A to point B. Back when the connectivity standard was a point to point T1 line, you had pretty decent security. A single line consisting of 2 twisted pair was dedicated to your use only. It was “nailed up”, as they say, meaning it was as close to a hard wire between two points that you could get. Only when you discontinued service was the connection “torn down” and the resources assigned to someone else.

Fiber Optic WAN and Multi-Tenant Networks
That’s not the way it is today. Unless you own a complete dark fiber run and light it yourself, you are sharing facilities with some and probably many other users. Note that you aren’t sharing bandwidth itself if you order a dedicated line. It’s just that high bandwidth fiber, be it SONET or Carrier Ethernet, is multiplexed to transport multiple streams of data and yours is simply stripped off the stream when it is delivered to your door.

It gets even more complicated in MPLS networks. These networks are multi-tenant by nature. The operator routes your data and that of other customers on the same core network and hands yours and only yours to you at the network edge.

Then, there's the Internet...
The security issues of the Internet need hardly be mentioned. You would have a hard time building a network that is less secure. But you don’t use the Internet for anything critical, right? If you have SDN connections over Cable Broadband or 4G Cellular, you probably are using the Internet for transport without realizing it.

Making the Insecure Secure
The answer to security jitters is encryption. On public networks, these encrypted data streams are said to be going through a “tunnel”. You can do the encryption and decryption yourself, or you can have your managed service provider take care of it.

Who Needs Encrypted Waves?
When it comes to high demand, high stakes uses, like medical data within hospital groups, there is a need for very high bandwidth channels that also have high security built-in. Level 3 Communications is at the frontier of a relatively new high performance connection called encrypted waves. These are based on the same wavelengths that are generated by coarse (CWDM) or dense (DWDM) wavelength division multiplexing. Each wavelength or set of wavelengths can deliver 10 to 100 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth. The multiplexing refers to multiple wavelengths, called colors or Lambdas, traveling over the same fiber strand. While leasing an entire wavelength does improve your security, encrypting that wavelength really adds security.

It’s simple in concept. The new wrinkle is that Level 3 is providing you with the wavelength already encrypted and protocol agnostic. Send whatever you want down the channel without having to worry about the nuts and bolts of securing that data stream.

Encrypted Wave Services Available Now
Here’s what Level 3’s Encrypted Wavelength service offers. The encryption is AES-256, the gold standard. You handle key management through your separate MyLevel3 portal that has two form factor authentication access. Ethernet speeds are supported at 10, 40 and 100 Gbps. SONET / SDH 10 Gbps is supported, as is OTU 2, 2e, 3 and 4. FICON and Fiber Channel (metro only) is supported at 8, 10 and 16 Gbps SAN. Low latency routes are optionally available for the highest performance.

Do you have high bandwidth needs that also require high security? You should take a closer look at what encrypted wavelength services have to offer. You may also be interested in dark fiber solutions. See what bandwidth options are available for your business locations now.

Your Desk Just Moved To The Cloud

By: John Shepler

When we think of the incredible progress made during the 20th century, it’s basically employment in three steps: Farm field to factory workbench to office desk. Well, now it’s the 21st century and we’re in the process of making the big workplace move again: From office desk to cloud.

Not Just the Great Beyond Anymore
Perhaps we always expected to move to the clouds someday… once those pearly gates swung open. Turns out that the cloud has come to us much sooner than expected and it's for the here and now. Whatever you’re doing at the moment, it has or soon will have a cloud connection.

Ironically, we’re not going to the cloud at all. We’re staying here and everything else is moving into clouds. The data center? Off to the cloud already. Retail stores? Mostly in the clouds right now. How about your desk? Oh, yes, it’s going to the cloud. Here’s how that will work:



But, Where Do I Sit?
You can sit anywhere you like, stand or even walk and still get your job done. The old desktop came with a tether. Before computers, that tether was the telephone. Then it was the PC. Until recently, there was no getting away from your desk for long because that’s where you had to do everything.

With Desktop as a Service, the PC tether is gone. Smartphones have already cut the phone tether. What’s going to keep you stuck at your desk from now on?

The Great Business Liberation
Employees and business owners are no longer captive Gulivers tied down at the office by an army of electronic Lilliputians. The business is now wherever you are. Actually, the enabling technology and the data that makes your business unique have moved to the cloud. An office building is just a convenience. It’s a place to meet and get in out of the rain. But it’s not a place you have to stay captive all day.

Business Is Wherever You Are
We no longer have to “go to the job.” The job accompanies us. Cloud based communications makes your smartphone part of the company telephone system. UC or Unified Communications combine video, text and voice into a single system that works on any device. Now, desktop as a service makes whatever you had on that big Mac or PC available on your phone, tablet, laptop or phablet. The big difference is screen size, although today’s mobile apps minimize the difficulty of switching from the big computer monitor to the little phone screen.

It’s a Mobile World, Even When It Isn’t
There’s a big push on right now to upgrade websites to mobile capability. Regardless of the implementation, every site has to look good and work on every device. Users are increasingly mobile or at least using mobile devices like tablets even when they are sitting at the restaurant or a client’s office. Even in the same old office you may switch to a wireless device just so you can get up and go down the hall to a meeting without skipping a beat.

Are You Ready to Shuck The Old Desktop?
The final stage in your liberation from the desk may well be DaaS. Are you ready to give your business the flexibility that Desktop as a Service offers? If so, it’s time to check out the benefits of higher performance, reduced maintenance and cost advantages that DaaS can provide your business.

Achieving Call Quality Momentum With Cloud Communications

By: John Shepler

Are you frustrated with your decades old in-house phone system that is getting more obsolete by the minute? Or, do you have a horror story that revolves around moving to VoIP only to find the reliability bad and the call quality worse? It’s time you gained some momentum with a superior cloud communications solution… like one from Momentum. Have a look….


If you are new to IP based voice communication, you may not be aware of the pitfalls that can ruin a good network voice system or the solutions that are just bad to begin with. This is where you need a “best of breed” vendor to ensure your success.

There are a couple of competing approaches to enterprise level VoIP. The first is to have the system located and operated in-house. You treat it as part of the IT infrastructure. That’s different from traditional approaches that have kept the telephone network and IT network forever separate.

Some companies only go so far as to replace their T1 telephone lines or ISDN PRI trunks with SIP trunks in order to get a better deal from a competitive service provider. Nothing changes in-house other than a new way to connecting to the phone company.

While this is the least amount of upset to the status quo, it does nothing to modernize your phone system. You gain none of the advanced calling features that VoIP systems have to offer. For that, you need to combine voice and data.

Enterprise VoIP, as opposed to a home office or small office with one or two phones, involves making the IT network also your phone network. You can add adaptors to your current analog phones so they connect to Ethernet, but you’re probably better off upgrading to IP telephones that have the network interface built-in plus all sorts of other capabilities.

Once you get all the phones on your LAN and off the phone wiring, you reach another fork in the road. Do you buy an in-house IP PBX system and continue to run everything yourself, or do you offload the switching system and connections to the public phone system to a cloud vendor?

Cloud communication is becoming a very attractive option. You avoid the capital investment of upgrading your in-house system and the ongoing maintenance costs. You also gain the ability to include remote workers in the system so you can communicate the same way no matter where you happen to be. Being tied to a desk, especially by a phone cord, can damage both your flexibility and productivity.

Momentum, the service provider, has some very attractive pluses in cloud communications. For one thing, they offer measurable call quality. Getting network voice right can be a tricky prospect and your customers will know if your phone system degrades. You also gain mobility, cloud disaster recovery and call center features. Best of all, you may find that your next phone system upgrade can save rather than cost you money.

Is your business ready to tap the advantages of cloud hosted communications? If so, find out what Momentum and other top tier providers have to offer. You may be surprised at what you can get for the same or less than you spend now.

Bandwidth on Demand Complements Cloud Services

By: John Shepler

A big advantage that cloud services have over running your own IT infrastructure is agility. A deep well of virtualized servers and disk drives combined with the ability to scale resources up or down on the fly gives businesses an unprecedented ability to match resources with need. The result? Greater productivity through higher resource utilization.

One part of the solution that hasn’t kept up with the move to virtualized resources is connectivity. The connection between your facility and the cloud is still treated as a large dedicated pipe of a fixed size. You can likely upgrade to a larger pipe when needed, but it is a major undertaking.

The WAN has to be reconfigured and equipment has to be replaced on-site. Just getting your order scheduled can involve serious time delays. The result is weeks or months needed to respond to a change in demand that the cloud handles almost instantaneously. Will bandwidth be the Achilles’ Heel of commerce?

Not for long. A major change already underway is the move from traditional TDM telecom services to Carrier Ethernet. What Carrier Ethernet offers, aside from a lower cost structure, is rapid scalability. The network is designed for quick changes and no premises equipment work is required so long as you have a large enough port installed. These days, that’s at least 100 Mbps and generally 1000 Mbps. Ports up to 10 Gbps are available.

Just because you have a larger Ethernet Port than you can use right now, doesn’t mean you have to pay for the full capability. You pick the bandwidth level that you need to support your operations and pay by the Mbps for that. The day will come when your current service gets maxed out, perhaps only at peak utilization times immediately and then most of the time. When you detect a bottleneck developing, you call your service provider and request an incremental upgrade. Your bandwidth will be increased in anywhere from a few hours to a few days.

What’s even better? Automatic bandwidth on demand. Why wait until network congestion starts to impact sales or employee productivity before you take action? Why not let the system monitor your activity and automatically increase your line speed when needed?

That’s the idea behind tw telecom’s new “Alerts Driven Dynamic Capacity” service. The idea is that you pre-set bandwidth utilization thresholds and the system automatically adds capacity when traffic rises above that threshold. You can double or triple your business Ethernet bandwidth up to 6 Gbps on a 10 Gbps port right on the fly. If the need is only to cover a short term peak demand, you can return to the originally committed network bandwidth when things slow down again.

What applications can make good use of this bandwidth on demand? tw telecom suggests that it is a good match for fluctuating demands on the network due to data backup & replication, seasonal traffic increases, limited time projects or campaigns, video conferencing, telepresence & streaming video, new software updates & deployment, variable cloud computing resource consumption and unforeseen events in general.

Where is this service available? It’s being offered to companies that have access available to tw telecom’s intelligent network services in any of the 18,500 fiber-connected buildings in 75 major metro areas.

Bandwidth on demand is clearly an idea who’s time has come. Agility is now part of efficient business structure, even being able to respond to changes in hours, minutes or even seconds. Look for these services to expand rapidly, perhaps as a part of a comprehensive cloud solution that increases the competitiveness of your business.

Are you in need of a better bandwidth or cloud solution? There is a lot to choose from compared to even a few years ago. Capabilities have increased while prices have been reduced. See what cloud and bandwidth services are available for your business locations from tw telecom and other major service providers.

Advanced Manufacturing Driving Faster WANs

Is it really different this time? The “Great Recession” has been not only deeper than others in our memory but something else has also happened. The recovery has been strong for business but weak for jobs. This has been credited to improvements in productivity beyond what anyone expected. Higher productivity directly translates into increased production without a corresponding increase in staffing. Is this the start of something new or a fluke of the current business conditions?

You’ve heard the expression “everything old is new again.” What’s new is a raft of new applications, techniques and processes. What’s old is the fact that, from time to time, the linear progress of business takes a leap up thanks to new technology. Personal computers were revolutionary in the office. Robots were revolutionary in the factory. It’s time for another leap.

It can be argued that most recent leap was staging for sometime and given a huge boost by the need to survive the protracted economic slowdown. Cloud computing is a perfect example. Before the cloud, everybody replicated and supported the IT infrastructure needed to operate the business. The cloud consolidates all of these resources under one roof where they can be more efficiently managed.

A side effect is that there are so many resources in the cloud that for any given customer it seems like a cornucopia. No matter how many servers and how many disk drives you need, there are always more available. Additionally, these resources have been automated so that provisioning can be almost instantaneous. Companies now have the opportunity to ramp up and ramp down IT infrastructure as fast as business conditions change. This is something new and a productivity improvement.

The data center with its racks and racks full of servers, disk drives and appliances has moved to the cloud. The in-house PBX telephone system is also gone. Only phones and PCs & tablets (thin clients) are needed on-site. The “big iron” is somewhere else and you rent rather than own it.

Here’s another wrinkle in this productivity revolution. Manufacturing is in the early stages of being completely rethought. Up till now, productivity improvements have been based automating tools. CNC machines replaced manually operated lathes, drill presses and milling machines with the same cutting tools under program control. Robots replaced human welders and assemblers by going through the same motions automatically.

What’s revolutionary is the 3D printer that eliminates the need for cutting and forming tools completely, and much of the assembly work too. A 3D printer is conceptually similar to a laser or ink jet printer but with the addition of a height dimension. They work by building the physical item layer by later. Each layer can be thought of something like a printed page. Stack all of those printed pages on top of each other without anything but the printed material bonded layer to layer and you have a physical item.

The advance in 3D printing is happening much faster than most people realize. It’s a little like the early days of PCs. You can buy or build hobby grade printers and use them to make mostly plastic pieces that would otherwise have been carved or injection molded. Industry is way beyond this stage, with 3D printers that make production quality parts out of plastic or metal. In fact, the process is so good that it has gone beyond making models and prototypes to creating the final manufactured component or product directly.

A recent report shows how the infrastructure needed for this new type of manufacturing is changing. Comcast announced that they have installed a 100 Mbps Ethernet Private Line connecting the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology with its Advanced Manufacturing Center two miles away. Why? They needed increased bandwidth to support transfer of 3D computer drawings to the 3D printer. One application is creating jet engine parts using 3D printing technology.

What cloud computing, 3D printing and other innovations, like big data mining, have in common is a need for orders of magnitude increases in WAN bandwidth. T1 lines and DS3 connections may have been fine for Internet browsing and file transfers between business locations, but the massive data sets required to enable technologies like 3D printing need much larger pipes to work efficiently. Today, 100 Mbps is readily available and affordable by many businesses. Gigabit Ethernet over Fiber is common for larger and higher tech organizations. Carriers are now offering 10 Gigabit Ethernet in many metro areas and 100 Gbps bandwidth is available in select locations.

Is it really possible to save money with these advancements? It certainly is, especially when you factor in the enormous cost reductions that have taken place in the bandwidth industry. Connection prices at 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps are much, much lower than in years past. Just in time, too. These bandwidth services are just what’s needed to enable the new productivity improving business technologies.

Have you become bandwidth limited in your quest for higher performance in your own operations? If so, take a fresh look at fiber optic bandwidth prices and service options available for your business locations.

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.

Take a Bow For The SIP Revolution

There’s a revolution underway in companies large and small. No, it’s not political, social or process related. This is a quiet revolution that few employees are aware of. It’s not really visible. It doesn’t force anyone to change the way they do things. All it does is give you more capability and save you money. Meet the SIP revolution.

What’s SIP and why is it so revolutionary? Here, watch this and get a quick introduction...



SIP is the language of VoIP telephony. If you think that VoIP is all about making home phone calls on your Cable broadband so you can ditch your telephone landline, you are only seeing a small piece of what SIP is all about. The reason that you can piggyback phone calls on a broadband service is that VoIP using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) for control and signaling transforms voice calls into a protocol that networks can transport.

Consumer VoIP services are all about trying to save money by having Internet broadband do double duty as a computer network and phone line. Once you get off the telephone company owned wiring, you can get your dial tone and local service from anywhere, just like switching long distance service. This same principle works for businesses, although using the Internet for this purpose is fraught with quality issues. It’s the concept of merging voice and data onto a single company network that’s important and where the big cost savings are.

A SIP Trunk is a line that can transport multiple telephone calls simultaneously along with data such as private point to point links or broadband Internet access while protecting voice quality at all times. SIP Trunks work for all size businesses, but they are especially attractive to companies with multiple business locations. This includes any company with branch offices, warehouse and factory sites, remote sales offices and regional headquarters.

What’s special about multi-site operations? Business productivity today depends on office automation. That automation is based on sophisticated software programs and databases running on a complex IT Infrastructure. Nearly every desk has a PC connected to the corporate LAN. The corporate LAN has MAN and WAN connections to include those remote sites as well as headquarters. It’s a sophisticated and expensive network but it is totally necessary. Unfortunately, it’s often duplicated by a separate multi-site network supporting the in-house telephone system.

What SIP Trunking can do is let your multi-site network support voice, data and Internet so that you don’t need a separate telephone network or separate outside telephone lines and broadband connections at every location. A central IP-PBX can handle switching internal calls among locations and connections to a telephone and dedicated Internet service provider. Are the savings that result from doing this significant? Does 20 to 60% cost savings sound significant to you?

Can your company benefit from the SIP revolution? You’ll never know until you get competitive pricing and system features for SIP trunking solutions appropriate to your size operation.

Concentric Cloud Solutions Virtualizes Your Business

You’ve been hearing a lot about virtualization recently and are wondering if it could be the answer to your unpredictable business costs. The only problem is that you don’t know quite where to start. It seems like there’s a lot to know before you can start deploying virtualized anything. Relax. Concentric will take care of that for you.

Virtualization started out in the local data center but it’s now moved to the cloud. The whole idea behind virtualization is that you can get higher performance out of a hardware infrastructure by making one server look like many servers and a cluster of small servers look like a super computer.

Why not just pair off software applications and computers? That’s the way we’ve done it for generations, ever since the days of ENIAC. It certainly works but it’s inefficient. As loads vary, you may be using only a portion of a server or have is so overloaded that you really need two. It takes so long to order new equipment, get it mounted and spun up, that you can’t respond quickly to changing needs. In order to get reliability, you wind up over-provisioning hardware. Then a big unexpected surge of activity comes in and you crash.

Virtualization separates server functionality from server hardware. You may have a dozen servers running on a single physical machine. You may have one server running over a dozen machines. All the magic is done in software, so changes can be made almost instantly.

This is the secret of the cloud. Racks and racks full of physical servers can be sliced and diced into virtual servers provisioned with a few keystrokes. Disk farms become virtualized storage. If one company is the sole user of all this, it’s called a private cloud. If many customers can share the same resources without interference, it’s called a public cloud. The owner and operator of the public cloud has just one job. That is to keep the cloud running no matter what happens. Each tenant needs to feel like they are the only one in the cloud no matter how many clients there really are.

If you do it right, you can move your back office infrastructure to the cloud. That’s what Concentric Cloud Solutions is offering businesses as an alternative to in-house IT and Telecom facilities. Services include Enterprise Cloud that offers on-demand cloud computing on a pay as you go or monthly prepaid plan. Cloud Storage complements cloud computing by making storage sharing and management of files and data available in the cloud. Managed Services offer a private cloud environment for companies that still want dedicated servers but don’t want to make the investment in-house. Smaller companies can benefit from Cloud Hosting to support websites, email and domains.

Content providers have special needs when it comes to getting their products to their customers. Concentric Acceleration Services address these needs for digital media, online content, mobile and web-based applications. Content Caching accelerates deliver of static web content that is repeatedly downloaded. Application Acceleration does the same for dynamic content you find on information portals, e-commerce apps and social media. Video content, such as webcasts and movies, is improved by Video Streaming Content Acceleration.

Cloud Voice Services address “your other network.” Telephony has occupied its own proprietary space until recently. Now the trend is converged voice and data networks to get to one network for everything. The next step is moving the voice support infrastructure to the cloud just like you do data servers. Concentric offers a Cloud Contact Center so you can establish virtual contact centers that free agents to work from anywhere. Pricing is pay as you go. Interactive Voice Response, Intelligent Call Routing, Conferencing and Concentric Connect create a suite of services that make communications in the cloud the sensible way to go.

Are you facing another round of capital investment to upgrade an aging or inadequate infrastructure? Don’t sign any loan applications until you first take a look a virtualized cloud-based solutions for voice and data. You’ll have greater flexibility and minimal investment with pay as you go solutions.

10 Mbps Up and Down

Have you heard that 10 Mbps is the new 1 Mbps? I've heard it said that 10 Mbps is the new T1. Those statements are pretty close, since T1 speed is 1.5 Mbps. Either way, there’s a move afoot to higher bandwidth levels and it should come as no surprise that 10 Mbps is becoming the new benchmark for SMB business bandwidth. Let’s see why.

T1 bandwidth established itself in the last couple of decades as the telephone industry made this digital technology available to businesses not related to telecom. One big impetus was the rise of the Internet. When the Internet opened up to business in the 90’s companies of all size suddenly got interested in getting online. That meant web servers, email and broadband connections. T1 lines were reasonably speedy for the time and readily available over twisted pair connections.

A lot has happened since the turn of the century. We still use web servers and email, but web pages have grown tremendously and much of the content is now audio, video and interactive. Commerce has moved online. Brochure pages have become full-fledged retail stores. Companies with both online and bricks & mortar operations may have common inventories that are managed in the cloud.

As you may well realize, the bandwidth of yore won’t cut it for today’s applications. Sure, a generation ago a T1 line could be shared by dozens of employees who thought they found the holy grail of high speed connections compared with the dial-up they were used to at home. Nowadays, 6 to 10 Mbps is considered about average for residential broadband. Some users are inclined to pay up for 2x or 3x that amount in order to support their insatiable video habit. You may not be sanctioning long periods of video watching at work, but you still need line speed to keep up productivity.

Look at what’s happening right now. Businesses large and small are relocating to the cloud. Data centers are going dark, as servers are moving to colo facilities and being sold off in favor of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). PBX systems are meeting a similar fate. The telephone closet is emptying out as companies go with hosted communications. What’s left is a phone on every desk plugged into the LAN along with a PC. These are augmented by smartphones and tablets. All that IT infrastructure is gone.

Well, it’s not really gone. It’s just located somewhere else and likely part of virtualized shared resources. What companies may forget in their zeal to gain the economic benefits of the cloud is that connectivity is now a choke point. The problems of running out of LAN bandwidth were solved so long ago that everyone takes lack of network congestion for granted. The memories of moving up from 1 Mbps to 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps and perhaps 1000 Mbps have become fuzzy and faded. Surprise! Those growing pains are being revisited in the form of connections to the cloud.

The bulk of traffic is now flowing back and forth to the cloud for companies that moved to hosted solutions. What that boils down to is that you need LAN quality connections to the WAN. Clearly T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps aren’t up to that. This is where 10 Mbps makes a lot more sense as a baseline. Don’t get too comfortable with that number. It’s going to be 100 Mbps before you know it.

For the moment, let’s take 10 Mbps as a baseline connection requirement. How do we get that without breaking the bank? There are a couple of easy growth paths that will give you 10 Mbps in both directions. That’s important with cloud services because you have data flowing both up and down. Your T1 line is symmetrical like that. It’s 1.5 Mbps upload and 1.5 Mbps download. Wouldn’t it make sense to simply hot rod a T1 line to get more speed?

Don’t laugh. That’s exactly what we’re going to do. You can’t jack up the speed of a single T1 line or it won’t be a T1 line anymore. In fact, it won’t run at all. T1 is a synchronized service that runs at 1.5 Mbps or shuts down. However, there is no reason you can’t run 2 T1 lines and combine their bandwidth. That process is called bonding. Bond 7 T1 lines together and you get 10.5 Mbps. Exactly what you need and a little more.

Another service that will get you to 10 x 10 Mbps bandwidth quite easily is Ethernet over Copper (EoC). This service runs on twisted pair telco cable, just like T1, so there is little or no construction cost involved in an upgrade. The modulation scheme is newer and trades distance for speed. That means that within a few miles of the telco central office you can easily get 10 Mbps and perhaps 20 or 30 Mbps over copper. Closer in that figure rises to DS3 levels of 45 Mbps. What’s more, EoC tends to be less costly on a per Mbps basis than bonded T1 lines.

Is your business straining its WAN connection to get the bandwidth you need? More speed may be less expensive than you think. Get competitive quotes for 10 Mbps bonded T1 and Ethernet over Copper services and see if now is the time to make the move.

Hosted SharePoint For Content and Collaboration

Microsoft SharePoint is popular with large corporations for content management, document management and collaboration. Could small and medium size companies benefit from the productivity improvements possible with office productivity systems like SharePoint? You bet they could, if only there was a way to use these advanced automation tools without having to invest in a major IT infrastructure expansion...

You’re in luck! Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is now available as a hosted solution through Integra Telecom. This is cloud computing scaled appropriately so that it also works for small and mid-size companies. Using Integra as your cloud service provider for SharePoint has a double advantage. You have access to their robust data center and computing platform and you also have dedicated high performance connectivity through the Integra fiber optic network. They offer everything from T1 lines through SONET OC48, Ethernet fiber optic services, and MPLS & VPLS network connections to serve multiple business locations.

Don’t discount the value of the connection network. Some companies are finding to their dismay that moving their IT operations to the cloud has a hidden “gotcha.” They failed to consider the effect of moving the majority of their traffic from the LAN to the WAN and wound up with a reliable but slow and unresponsive system. By having a single provider for your cloud services and connectivity, you have a single point contact to ensure that MAN, WAN and cloud are compatible.

Hosted SharePoint, itself, is a real-time application, call it SaaS or Software as a Service, that boosts employee productivity through ease of document management and collaboration. It consists of six integrated functions or capabilities. These include Sites, Communities, Content, Search, Insights and Composites.

Sites refers to web sites. With SharePoint 2010, you can create web sites quickly and easily without having to become an accomplished designer. These can be either internal or external web sites, with multiple sites managed from a single location. Share your documents with colleagues, publish information to customers and manage projects with partners.

Communities are groups formed around teams, projects, clients, locations, departments, and so on. They are based on collaboration within the group through social media features.

Content is your central library. There is where files, documents and general information is located. SharePoint makes it easy to find and manage all this information with a massive, smart search engine. You can access and modify content with a web browser, client application like Microsoft Office or a smartphone.

The Search capability can be tailored depending on who is doing the searching. Some content is reserved for internal use. Other content is available for clients. Still more is intended for the general public.

Insights is your business intelligence function. It integrates data and generates reports that give you, well, insights on how your business is running and where the trouble spots and opportunities lie.

Composites is for extending and customizing SharePoint. If you have a need or desire to go beyond what’s offered off-the-shelf, then you can use SharePoint Designer or Microsoft Visual Studio to create your own business solutions customized to your particular environment.

You can expand the capabilities of SharePoint with hosted Microsoft Exchange to store documents online, protect files, run blogs and wikis, and manage projects. Running everything in the cloud means you can scale resources to meet your needs without capital investment or lengthy approval and procurement cycles.

Do you have that nagging feeling that your business would benefit from the automation and productivity boosts offered by SharePoint and like the idea of paying as you go versus making a large capital outlay, then check out pricing and options for Hosted Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and high performance connectivity from cloud service and networking providers like Integra Telecom.

Hosted Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is getting a lot of interest today for good reason. As stagnated economic conditions become the new normal, the attractiveness of pay as you go computing becomes more compelling. Combine that with near instant scalability and you have a computing environment that has a cost related to your level of business activity, with little or no need for planned investments. There are other advantages, too. These have to do with disaster recovery and business telephone infrastructure.

Let’s take disaster recovery. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes and fires are real threats to company data centers. What happens if you get wiped out? You can rebuild, of course. But how long is that going to take and how do you do business in the meantime?

Cloud computing can come to the rescue. The infrastructure is already in place. All you need to do is sign up for service and upload your software and data files. You DO have backups stored remotely, right? Perhaps that’s another good argument for having at least some computing or storage in the cloud. A local disaster probably won’t affect a remote data center.

Company telephone systems are also local infrastructure intensive. They require investment, maintenance, repaid and eventual replacement. Once again, if a local disaster strikes your phones can be down for the long haul. A Hosted PBX system is the voice equivalent of cloud computing. You pay by the seat by the month for switching services and a rich feature set. The provider takes care of all equipment, sometimes including the actual phones in the monthly service fee.

Cloud services comprise a wide diversity in types of services available and in the mix of private vs public clouds. Yes, you can own and run your own cloud. If your company is large enough to justify the investment and expense and you want total control, it is certainly feasible to set up your data centers under a cloud model. What this involves is redundancy in hardware and extensive virtualization. You need enough resources on standby to ensure that you can accommodate failures plus any swing in workload demand. If you run out of resources, it’s not much of a cloud.

The other extreme is to outsource everything to a public cloud. You wind up with no servers or storage and only need to bring your applications software and a high bandwidth, low latency connection. The cloud provider ensures there is sufficient capacity in the system to serve all users. That includes being able to scale to meet increasing demand and bursting to handle short term peaks.

A full public cloud makes companies with large and critical needs a bit nervous. Murphy’s Law has been known to strike everywhere, including Amazon’s massive cloud structure. There’s also anxiety over security. Determined hackers seem to find their way into anything where there’s even the slightest opportunity. You can claim military grade encryption all you want, but it’s tough to prove that break-ins are impossible and will always be impossible.

For those reasons, large operations are leaning to the hybrid cloud model with some resources local and others off in the cloud. There are a couple of other approaches to keeping everything with your own walls. One is to have someone else build and operate a private cloud for you. That’s a cloud-modeled computing environment but dedicated to your exclusive use. The private cloud can be hosted in a secure colocation facility close to high bandwidth providers. You not only offload the cost of ownership and maintenance, but can probably save on bandwidth costs too.

The other hosted solution is to create your own cloud, but do within the colo center using rented equipment. In this case, you are still responsible for the design and resource allocation of the hosted cloud, but it’s all done on a pay by the month basis rather than capital investment.

Are you interested in giving cloud computing a role in your business strategy? If so, compare features and costs for cloud hosted voice and data services to meet your business needs.