Outsource Your Network Headaches

By: John Shepler

Back when all the network equipment fit into a literal broom closet and Cat5 cables hooked it all together, running a LAN with a connection to the Internet was an all in a day’s work. Now you’re dealing with multiple clouds, multiple locations, bad actors constantly trying to intrude, and equipment going obsolete almost before you can even power it up. The level of complexity is growing exponentially, but your staff and resources aren’t. Is there any way to simplify all of this?

Make Network Woes Someone Else’s Problem
You can keep doing it all yourself. That means hiring more and more staff, constantly refreshing hardware, troubleshooting outages and dealing with outside attacks on a daily basis. Or, you can let someone else take care of it.

The first approach to outsourcing network grief is to contract with a Manage Service Provider or MSP. This is an outside company that acts as your IT department. You still own all the equipment and services, but someone else provides the staff to manage it for you.

A newer approach is Network as a Service or NaaS. It’s a logical extension of Software as a Service. You stopped buying boxes with CD-ROMs to update your systems years ago. Most software is now offered on a subscription basis. Computing hardware has gone the same way with cloud-based services. Why not take the same approach to networks?

How NaaS Works
When you employ NaaS, you are essentially turning your network into a subscription. Just like SaaS you pay as you go and you pay for what you use. You dump capital expenditures and trade them for operational expenses.

NaaS can be implemented on a WAN or LAN basis. WAN networks include whatever it takes to interconnect various business locations, cloud providers and general Internet service. You can also outsource your LAN so that NaaS provides all the in-house routers, switches and security appliances needed to run the network.

What about SD-WAN?
Software Defined Wide Area Networking is a flavor of NaaS that can improve WAN performance, especially in accessing the Internet. SW-WAN combines multiple lines, such as fiber optic, Fixed Wireless Access, cable broadband, and satellite to get the highest performance for your most critical functions. It automatically monitors each line and selects which path each packet should take. Higher priority packets get faster and lower latency paths, while lower priority tasks get what’s left. NaaS may incorporate SD-WAN to improve network performance.

The NaaS Advantage
There’s a certain efficiency in not being short of resources when you desperately need them to conduct business, or getting stuck with a back room full of hardware you’ll have to keep until things pick up or unload at fire sale prices. Worse yet, who wants to be laying off valuable tech employees during a downturn only to have to recruit and on-board new ones when business increases?

NaaS can also introduce some new features, such as constant AI monitoring and self-healing networks. Your network becomes another type of cloud that just gets a job done without you having to fight fires or worry about how to add this or that capability.

When NaaS Doesn’t Make Sense
As attractive as outsourcing your network woes sounds to many companies, it’s not for everyone. Companies that have large expert teams with deep knowledge of the network infrastructure and business operations may be able to provide an operational ability and efficiency beyond what an outside company can. This is especially true in heavily regulated industries or those with unique requirements.

How about your business? Does your network run like a well oiled machine with a staff that has knowledge not easily replaced? Or, are you struggling to deal with growth, a changing environment, difficulty in finding the right staff, constant problems that are hurting productivity or facing an equipment refresh that is going to be a strain on the finances?

Before you spend a fortune, you might want to consider the alternative of Network as a Service. Get expert consulting and proposals that meet your particular needs now with compelling NaaS solutions.

Cloud Computing Appropriate For Small Business

Cloud computing is all the rage among medium and larger enterprises. You might say that there is a veritable stampede from local data centers to cloud based services. Small businesses may be left scratching their heads trying to figure out if the cloud makes any sense for them or if it is simply overkill for their size organizations.

In reality, cloud computing may make even more sense for smaller companies that it does for large ones. Why? It’s because major corporations have major budgets for large IT staffs and in-house data centers. The idea is that if you integrate everything under your control, you’ll logically have the lowest costs, greatest security and fastest response times.

There are many cloud examples that prove this is obsolete reasoning. Hiring a specialist service, the cloud, can actually lower your costs, improve security and allow you to react to changes in business conditions much faster than doing it all yourself.

For smaller businesses, the cloud may well become your IT department or an adjunct to a consultant that works on a less than full time basis. Cloud service providers have the expertise in-house that you can’t really afford. This means that you can get top-notch support by people who are trained in the state of the art included as part of your monthly fee.

Let’s take a look at typical cloud computing solutions that are appropriate for small businesses. One service that nearly every business, including SOHO (Small Office, Home Office), is embracing is cloud backup storage. The value in remote backups is that even if your local office is wiped out by fire, flood or tornado, your business records remain safely intact. Storage tends to be very affordable and more cost effective than buying more and more stand alone disk drives. The beauty of the cloud is that you don’t have to worry about filling up the next disk drive. Storage is virtualized and nearly unlimited.

An extension of online storage is backup and disaster recovery. These systems give you an easy to use control panel so that you can figure out what files to bring back down when needed. One thing to remember about online backup is that the limiting factor to how fast you can upload and download is the speed of your bandwidth connection. It’s not much of a problem on upload because files are being transmitted in the background as you work. Only a little bit of data needs to be sent to the cloud every hour.

The real limitation is when your entire office or local file storage is wiped out. You’ll be glad you have backup storage in the cloud so you can stay in business, but it can take days or weeks to bring everything back down. You’ll need to pick and choose which files are most important to continuing business and get those back first. The rest can be restored as a background activity.

Some cloud solutions get around this by having mirrored storage in both the cloud and in a secure appliance located in your office. This makes it really easy and fast to get a file you may have accidentally deleted and fast to restore an entire system because so much of the data is local. Of course, if the disaster is extensive and all of your on-site equipment is destroyed, you’ll still need to get everything back from the cloud.

By the way, a big advantage of cloud solutions is that you can be quickly back in business at another location. This is especially true if some or all of your connectivity is via the Internet. Set up shop at home, a temporary rental office or at the local coffee shop. As long as you have bandwidth, you’re in business.

Web servers are another technology that makes sense in the cloud. Many companies already rent shared or dedicated server space from companies that specialize in selling these plans. There is no need for anything more sophisticated unless you have the type of business with such variations traffic that you wind up paying to support the maximum number of visitors possible. Cloud servers can be scaled up and down almost instantly. You pay only for what you need right now and add more capacity during the holiday season or other high traffic times.

The old fashioned way to get the computer tools you need for your business is to buy software packages and then spend some time maintaining and upgrading them over the years. The new approach is called SaaS or Software as a Service. The actual software resides on a cloud computing platform remotely. You use the office systems or specialized software by connecting to the cloud. The cloud provider takes care of patching and upgrading the system so you have no maintenance headaches and no need to invest in expensive software. Once again, you pay for how much you use by the month.

Security is now moving to the cloud. The truth is that few businesses have security experts on staff and the attacks are getting bolder and more sophisticated. A simple anti-virus program may no longer be enough to prevent an intrusion or shutdown of your business. The way to have the latest network security is to buy a cloud based solution that acts as a firewall between your business and any potential trouble makers. Like software, security as a service is maintained by experts who have nothing else to do but stay on top of threats.

Finally, even your telephone service may make more sense in the cloud. Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP systems move all the call switching to a cloud service provider that also makes the connection to the public phone system. All you have at your location is IP telephones and perhaps a specialized gateway device. You pay by the phone by the month and some providers even include new business phones as part of the deal at no extra cost.

Is it time to reconsider the costs and performance of the IT systems used in your small business? There are great deals to be had that can help you avoid investments, lower expenses and keep up with the latest technology. Get competitive quotes from cloud computing providers and see what works best for your company.