Dark and Lit Private Lines

By: John Shepler

The Internet is a marvelous network. It enables all of us to connect to any of us anywhere in the world and at a very reasonable cost. Why wouldn’t you use the Internet for all your communications? Much of the time we do, both for personal and business needs. It works great… well, it works just fine a lot of the time. There are a few snags, though.

Network Priority
One is priority for highly sensitive applications like interactive voice and video. Say, telephone calls. There is no priority. Your voice packets get the same treatment as your next door neighbors video stream or someone backup up files to the cloud. Get in line and take your turn. When things get too busy, called network congestion, your real-time stream may break up or stop completely for a short time.

Cloud Critical Applications
The same is true for business critical applications running in the cloud. If you are taking orders, interacting with a customer or needing fast answers to deal with rapidly moving situations you may be drumming your fingers as you wait for the system to respond. Trying to make a quick financial trade in the market? Maybe it executes immediately. Maybe not. You may or may not get the price you had in mind.

Network Security
Another issue is security on the Internet. There is none. If you want security, you need to add it yourself. That means encryption. A popular way to encrypt your traffic when out of the office is by using a VPN or virtual private network. This is end to end encryption that makes it safer to use public access points like WiFi in coffee shops or send sensitive documents across the Internet. SSL or, now, TLS encryption has made possible online shopping and banking with confidence using web browers over the Internet with or without a VPN.

Improving Performance with Private Lines
You can get better network performance with private lines. Think private road versus crowded superhighway. The idea is to limit the competition from other people’s traffic.

You can still use the Internet but make it run better with a private line called DIA or dedicated Internet access. This gives you a private, not shared, connection between your location and your Internet service provider. Of course the Internet core itself is still a shared resource, but most of the congestion is in the last mile where you and hundreds or thousands of other users share the same connection to the service provider.

Direct to the Cloud
A direct cloud connection is a private line between you and your cloud service provider. Since you are the only user on that line, your cloud services should run much more like they would if the servers were right down the hall in your building. This type of connection avoids the Internet and its vagaries completely.

Why not expand that concept to your own private WAN or wide area network? This means private lines to connect your offices, factories, data centers and branch locations or retail outlets. Think of it like having your LAN expand to include all of your other business locations. You have control of the traffic and no interference from other outside users. Both privacy and performance are improved.

Dark and Lit Fiber
So far we are talking about fiber optic services, likely Ethernet over Fiber, which is the most popular connection method today. These are “lit” fiber connections where the laser equipment that maintains the signal is owned and operated by a service provider. The ultimate in performance and privacy over metropolitan and wider areas is using “dark” fiber. Dark means the fiber strands that you lease have no termination equipment at either end. You are responsible for providing the equipment that “lights” the fiber and sets the protocol. Since the glass fiber strands have nearly unlimited bandwidth, you have tremendous ability to send traffic from point to point dependent only on your budget and technical staff.

Wireless Private Lines
Finally, there is a new type of wireless service called 5G private networking or 5G network slice that lets you have the advantage of private lines while portable or mobile. It’s something like your own private corporate WiFi, but over much wider distances. Coupled with fiber optic private lines for most of your traffic, private wireless can give you a comprehensive business network wherever you are.

Is private networking right for your business? Find out what private network and security options are available now.

You Are Definitely Going to Need More Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

All of a sudden, business as usual isn’t. Forget the norms of office life. They’re gone. Nobody comes in and sits at their desk anymore. The cubicles are empty. The parking lot is empty. Row after row of desktop computers and phones are… off.

So, Where Is Everybody?
To be fair, a skeleton crew is in the building. Most everyone else is at home. It’s been a mad scramble to connect remotely by home computer, iPad & smartphone via cable and cellular broadband. Bandwidth usage has soared 30% or more. Video conferencing has come into its own using those built-in microphones and cameras over Skype, Zoom, FaceTime, RingCentral, GoToMeeting, Webex and the like.

Not as Temporary as You Think
You probably think this traumatic upset of normal business practice is a transient thing. Just a few weeks of toughing it out and everything will go back to normal. That’s almost certainly wishful thinking. This pandemic has peaked or is peaking in areas that were hit hard and hit early. But that doesn’t mean it’s over. The horror of infection rates, deaths and failing medical systems will abate in one area after another. But, the disaster will soon pop up in areas that weren’t hit early and haven’t seriously locked down until recently. Think of a rolling disaster, from city to city and even into less populous areas. Just when you think it is all over, it is expected that there will be a re-infection in the Fall and sickness will spread again.

Eventually, there will be effective therapeutics and then vaccines. Those are likely months and possibly a year or more away. Until then, you might not be living in a constant horror movie, but it certainly won’t be business as usual. You might as well dig-in and figure how to run a successful business without large numbers of people rubbing shoulders in one big workspace or cozying up to customers at your place or theirs.

The New Virtual Business Requirements
You are going to need to master distributed processes, secure communications, and remote everything. You’ll need VPNs for security, private and public cloud services to host the software that defines your organization, and lots and lots of bandwidth to tie it all together. “Touchless” will be the new, new thing that everybody wants. That means technology substituting for hands-on.

What types of bandwidth do you need? Certainly, sketchy home broadband won’t do. Your remote employees may not even be eligible to connect to the high performance business grade private lines that commonly link offices, but they will need sufficient reliable bandwidth for both video conferencing with colleagues, management and customers. Bandwidth and latency need to be good enough that the home computer runs like the office computer. Cable broadband may do a decent job but remote areas present a challenge. In some cases, an SD-WAN solution aggregating cable, T1, WISP, 4G and 5G cellular and perhaps even satellite may be a good composition solution.

Especially Demanding Applications
Medical offices, labs, and hospital campuses need really high performance bandwidth. That includes Gigabit Ethernet and 10 GigE fiber, dark fiber and MPLS networks for interconnecting far-flung facilities or collaborating companies. Fortunately these connections are readily available in populated areas, although more of a challenge in rural locations.

Your IT Bandwidth Requirements
Reconsider your own IT Department connectivity needs. They've changed. You'll want your connection to public, private and hybrid cloud services to be high performance, dedicated bandwidth links. This will give you much faster, more responsive and stable connections than the Internet can provide. You'll want the closest to "LAN" quality performance from any of your business locations. This can be achieved with dedicated point to point fiber optic lines, Metro Ethernet services and MPLS Networks that span wide geographical areas, including worldwide service.

After The Disaster
Someday this will all be over, but things might not go back to the way they were. Companies may be amazed at how productive employees are in home offices, even with kids and pets under foot and no supervisor breathing down their neck. Fact is, a lot of socializing went on in those cubicle farms and the office computers hosted a lot of personal web use and email. Letting many, maybe most employees work from home reduces their need for commuting and, perhaps, child care. It reduces your need for real estate and facilities. Managing performance by goal oriented results may finally replace monitoring physical presence as the business norm.

Expect that you will have a lot more remote work and that core teams may be housed in much smaller facilities or even rented meeting spaces. Video conferencing may replace a lot of business travel that was once thought essential. The same level of productivity might, surprisingly, be achieved at considerably lower cost overall with more flexibility. Additional help could be quickly brought on without the delays and expense of relocation.

Now, What do YOU Need?
Has the shock of recent upsets found you scrambling for IT resources, especially bandwidth, secure communications, video conferencing and hosted telephone solutions? We can help you right now. Call toll free 888-848-8749 or tell us what you need to support your business.

You Need a Black Cloud Software Defined Perimeter

By: John Shepler

Are you a trusting person? Too bad. That’s going to get you hacked. Respect and privacy are admirable things, but they are not guaranteed by today’s Internet. In addition to all the incredible employees, partners, suppliers and customers that you hold in high regard, there is a dark underbelly of professional criminals, hobbyist & mercenary hackers, mischief makers, psychotics, and nation states with agendas all trolling the same network. Some are looking for victims of opportunity. Others have you in mind as a target. Can your firewall and VPN fend them off?

The Virtual Hopefully Private Network Connection
The VPN or Virtual Private Network was designed to make the Internet act more like a private line or MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) network. Even if you have a T1, DS3, OC3 or Ethernet private line at the office, you have a big security hole when an employee out on a sales or repair call stops by the coffee shop and connects back using the free Wi-Fi provided by the store.

Free really means free and open. That guy in the corner staring at his laptop is watching your traffic. He either hacked the shop’s WiFi or created his own look-alike “free” WiFi network that you connected to instead of the real one. This is called “man in the middle” and it is what VPN was designed to protect against. The VPN creates an encrypted connection called a “tunnel” from your employee’s computer to your office server. That makes it pretty hard for someone to get in the middle of the conversation unless they have the private key… and they don’t.

VPN Weaknesses
Not all VPNs have a rugged 256 bit military-grade encryption. Some use protocols that are relatively easy to crack with available hacker tools. PPTP (Peer to Peer tunneling Protocol) is over 20 years old and is desirable because it is fast and easy to setup and use. It’s also more vulnerable than protocols with stronger encryption.

Not all VPN vendors are equally capable. Weak ones may have back doors in their servers or other weaknesses that make it easy to hack the VPN server in the cloud and get everybody’s data. You won’t know until you are hacked and can’t figure out how.

An overall weakness of VPN is that it just protects the tunnel into your company. If that is compromised one way or the other, your entire network and everything on it is wide open to explore and perhaps attack. it would be better if only a small part of the company assets were exposed instead of everything all at once.

The Software Defined Perimeter Black Cloud
The idea behind a Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) is that trust is minimized by allowing access to resources user by user on a need to know basis. The research was done by the U.S. Department Information Systems Agency (DISA) and has come to be known as a “Black Cloud.” The black designation means that the network infrastructure is hidden within the cloud. There are no visible DNS or IP addresses.

SDP authenticates each user and only gives them access to the resources you have approved for that particular user so they can do their jobs. The user or IoT device has no idea what else is on the network. They can’t see it. If they can’t see it, they can’t get access. Someone impersonating that user can’t either.

A system of SDP Hosts and Controllers communicate and verify the authorizations. The Controller has the job of connecting the Initiating and Accepting Host data channels through a Gateway, once authentication and authorization has been completed through the control channels.

The SDP is not only between clients and the data center. It is also deployed within the data center to partition the network to isolate high-value applications. Only a limited number of users with have access to the highly protected application or even know it exists.

Encryption and cloaking are key to SDP security. The usual network probing, such as port scanning, won’t work because nothing will show up in the scan. In a way, SDP is creating virtual networks on a user by user, session by session, basis. What goes on behind the curtain is a complete mystery.

The End of Networks As We Know Them?
The TCP/IP network that has served us so well for decades has to go underground to keep its relevance in today’s high threat environment. We can no longer do business without the Internet and there are just too many bad actors on the public Internet. Technology must evolve to provide the illusion of a simple open Internet but with none of the familiar network topology visible.

Has your company network been hacked or are you concerned about the business disruption this might cause? Right now would be a good time to see what advances have been made in network security, especially managed security solutions in the cloud.

Private Lines and Virtual Private Networks

By: John Shepler

Businesses often have need for a private line to communicate between headquarters and branch offices, factories & warehouses, retail franchises or suppliers. What’s important is reliable connections with security and transparency. The ideal private line gives you the same experience as your local area network.

Classic Point to Point Private Lines
Telephone companies have offered private lines since the analog days. Security systems and radio station studio to transmitter links are examples of private lines that were often little more than pairs of wires that ran directly from one location to another via the central office.

Digital communication introduced the T1 point to point private line that serves the same purpose. Bits go in one end and come out the other. T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps, DS3 at 45 Mbps and OC3 at 155 Mbps all offer private line service. Latency and packet loss are low. Speeds are fixed at the capacity of the line.

These private lines work well for connecting a central headquarters as a hub to branch offices as spokes. It takes one line per branch with the central switch or router directing traffic. The lines themselves serve as very, very long network wires to interconnect the LANs at the various locations.

Ethernet Private Lines
Since Ethernet is the protocol used on virtually all local networks today, it makes sense to have the private line running the same protocol. The telco solutions already mentioned require a protocol conversion module to convert between Ethernet and the proprietary protocol that runs on the lines themselves.

Carrier Ethernet private lines run the Ethernet protocol on the line itself. Carrier Ethernet is available as Ethernet over Copper for lower speed connections and Ethernet over Fiber for 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps, with 100 Gbps becoming more available.

Ethernet services have more carriers competing for business which tends to reduce prices per Mbps. The cost per Mbps is almost always less for Ethernet and scalability is much easier. You can have a Gigabit Ethernet port installed and order any bandwidth from 10 Mbps up to 1000 Mbps. When you want an increase or decrease in capacity, a simple phone call to the carrier will make that happen quickly with no equipment changes required.

MPLS Networks
Private lines are a great solution if you only need to interconnect a few locations in a small geographical area. As the number of locations and their distance from headquarters increases, the cost goes up quickly. Each line has a charge and it varies with distance.

A popular alternative is the MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching network. This is a privately run network that uses a proprietary protocol called label switching instead of the more common TCP/IP. The fact that access is limited to subscribers only and the uniqueness of the LS protocol provide a level of security even though you are sharing the network with other users.

MPLS operators work to ensure that you have no awareness of other traffic. Bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss are carefully managed to meet the needs of all subscribers with extra margin for bandwidth bursting when needed.

MPLS is also known a MPLS VPN or Virtual Private Network. That’s because it isn’t truly private and fully dedicated to your use like a private line. If you are feel that you need a additional level of security, you do have the option to encrypt your data before it enters the MPLS network.

Why choose MPLS? It’s a big money saver over long distances where private lines get expensive. All you need is a short private line connection to the network at each location and instructions to the operator as to how to route your traffic.

Internet VPN Solutions
The Internet is the least cost wide area networking solution with highest geographic connectivity. Performance can vary widely. It’s also the least secure network you can find. Anyone and everyone can easily get a connection, and they do.

How can you make the Internet act like a private line? You provide your own encryption from point to point. Two popular approaches are IPsec based on software installed on each computer and SSL or Secure Socket Layer that is already built into web browsers.

Choosing a Private Line Solution
Which approach is best? It depends highly on how many locations you have, where they are, what traffic you intend to send, and what level of performance you require.
There are cost/benefit tradeoffs to each of the above solutions. What’s right for you? An expert consultant will be happy to review your private line or VPN network needs and provide one or more solutions that can do what your business needs done.

Private Point to Point Connections

By: John Shepler

Sometimes you need to get your traffic from Point A to Point B with as much security and transparency as possible. Let’s look at popular options to do just that.

What Are Dedicated Private Lines?
You can think of a dedicated private line as a connection between two locations that goes through a carrier. This is what you need if you can't just string the wires between buildings on your own campus. The private line acts like your own wiring, except that it is provided by another company. Private lines can go across town, between cities, or even around the world.

T1 Dedicated Lines
T1 lines are the digital equivalent of the old “dry loops” or “equalized loops” that phone companies leased to radio stations and burglar alarm companies. A dedicated T1 point to point line goes between two locations using telco twisted pair wiring. You need routers or other equipment with the T1 interface at each end.

T1 dedicated lines offer 1.5 Mbps in both directions with no usage limits. A popular application is audio transport such as studio to transmitter links (STL) for radio stations.

T1 dedicated lines are still used for cellular traffic backhaul. They were extremely popular prior to 4G LTE, which really needs more bandwidth than you get with T1. In some cases, multiple T1 lines can be bonded together to create a larger bandwidth solution. Where fiber is unavailable, it is possible to get 10 or 12 Mbps from bonded T1 lines.

DS3 Dedicated
The next step up in traditional TDM telecom circuits is the T3 or DS3 dedicated line. These offer 45 Mbps upload / download private links. DS3/T3 is considered a copper-based service. In actuality, most of the transmission distance is handled over OC3 or other SONET fiber optic circuits, with only the curb connection carried by dual coaxial copper cables.

Ethernet over Copper
Ethernet over Copper (EoC) is a technical improvement on T1, while using the same twisted pair infrastructure. EoC easily offers bandwidths in the 1 to 10 Mbps range, with some systems delivering up to 50 or even 100 Mbps over relatively short distances. If available, you may find that you can replace a bonded T1 solution or DS3 circuit with EoC for a considerable cost savings.

Fiber Optic Dedicated Lines
Higher bandwidths are more and more in demand. Fortunately, fiber optic private lines are more affordable than in years past. There are two technologies of interest, although it may not make much difference in performance which you choose. SONET is the legacy telco standard, with services such as OC3, OC12 and OC48 providing different bandwidth options. Ethernet over Fiber is the technical upgrade to SONET. It offers advantages of being easily scalable from 10 Mbps up to 10 Gbps or higher, and is usually the lower cost solution.

Virtual Private Lines
The Internet offers lower cost solutions to interconnect multiple locations, but it is far from dedicated or private. The attractive pricing comes from being a shared resource with universal connectivity available nearly everywhere in the world. You can’t do much about the fact that the bandwidth is shared and not dedicated to your own use, which might affect the performance of your applications. The lack of privacy can be addressed by encrypting your traffic which effectively creates a private “tunnel” or VPN through the Internet.

A more robust solution is provided by MPLS networks. These can be thought of as privately run versions of the Internet that connect only businesses and not the general public. Proprietary protocols are used for routing traffic on the network, which adds security to the transmissions. MPLS networks are often described as MPLS VPN. Network capacity and performance are actively managed by the network operator so that a shared core network can perform like a private line, Over long distances, MPLS offers considerable cost savings over a dedicated copper or fiber connection.

Do you need a high performance dedicated private line connection to support your critical application? If so, get pricing and tradeoffs available for a variety of private line solutions available to your business locations.

Different Types of VPN Providers

Your network is private and you work hard to keep it that way. What about when you connect to the outside world? Do you open your castle gate to let in everybody and everything festering on the Internet? Or, do you protect your network over long distances by using a private or virtually private network?

Before there were VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) there were private networks. There still are. Some situations require so much security that the only way to be sure you maintain control and avoid all intrusion is by using private line point to point connections. You might even go one step further and encrypt the data traveling on those private lines on the odd chance that someone has figured out how to tap in.

Private lines make the most sense when you have only two locations to connect. You can order order a “nailed up” T1 line from point to point. By “nailed up” I mean that the connection is hard wired and stays that way as long as you pay the monthly lease. There is no traffic other than yours on this circuit. Whatever you aren’t using to full capacity simply idles while waiting to be used day and night.

Need a lot more bandwidth? You can order DS3 private lines at 45 Mbps or move up to fiber optic service starting at 155 Mbps. An alternative is Carrier Ethernet over copper or fiber. With Ethernet you have many more bandwidth options and the cost is generally lower than with traditional telecom services.

Note that these circuits are dedicated to your locations, but your data may be multiplexed with data from other users while it is on the line. SONET fiber service and Ethernet over Fiber has so much bandwidth that it doesn’t make economic sense to use an entire strand or even a wavelength for 50 or 100 Mbps of traffic.

This is the beginning of virtual private networking. In this case, the provider divvies up the available bandwidth by TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) time slots or virtual private circuits. Since the network is privately operated, you have the protection that the general public has no outside access to any of this traffic and no way to snoop on your data stream or cause trouble.

If you need really massive amounts of bandwidth, you can rent wavelengths on fiber circuits at typically 5 Gbps or rent dark fiber strands themselves that can support nearly unlimited bandwidth. These offer an increased security in that only your traffic is on the wavelength or fiber strand.

Another VPN methodology is the MPLS network. MPLS or Multi Protocol Label Switching also runs on privately operated networks. It transports IP traffic as well as other protocols but doesn’t use IP labels for routing. Instead MPLS switches install special tags on each packet upon entry to the network and remove them before egress. This is where the virtual private designation comes in. You share the network with other users, but the proprietary MPLS technology protects the privacy of your data while it is on the network. You’ll hear this service referred to as MPLS VPN.

The most common application for VPN is when using the Internet as your connection from point to point or to the general public. If you do business on the Internet, you don’t really have a choice. You may also want to have home workers or traveling employees connect to your business systems without the expense of private lines. The challenge is how to make an inherently risky network like the Internet into something your can trust with sensitive date.

The answer is “tunneling.” This is a concept for creating private channels through a public network. The tunneling is accomplished by encrypting each packet so that it makes no sense to anyone but the intended parties. There are two software methods commonly used to accomplish this.

The legacy method is IPsec or Internet Protocol security. This requires special software to be installed on the company server and client computer. IPsec does the encryption and decryption and must be specially set up to create the virtually private tunnel. One installed, you have a VPN connection from wherever you want to use that particular computer. Other computers must have the same software installed or they won’t work on the VPN.

A competing method is called SLL or Secure Socket Layer. This is the technology you use when accessing your bank account or secure email. It’s become so standard that it is built into all Web browsers and many email programs. With SSL, you need a user account ID and a password to access your remote account. The nice feature is that you an access your account from just about any computer, private or public, and know that your data is securely encrypted.

Are you in need of a business-grade private or virtually private network connection? If so, check out the options and decide which works best for your applications.

MPLS Networks Simplified

Have you been hearing a lot of buzz about MPLS networks lately but not exactly sure just what is a MPLS network and how it differs from other networks? Here’s the really simplified lowdown on MPLS technology in less than 3 minutes...


So, why go to all the trouble to set up a “bar coding technology” when IP networks are so prolific? IP works great within your organization where you have complete control of the network. You can manage the traffic, add and subtract resources, and set-up class of service mechanisms to ensure that time sensitive traffic like VoIP or video conferencing isn’t crushed by big data file transfers or backup and restore processes.

Not so on the Internet. Every packet gets the same handling as every other packet. The fault tolerant features of Internet technology pretty much ensure that if packets can’t take one particular path, they can find another more round about way to get to their destination. This is great for TCP/IP applications like file transfers, but deadly for two-way voice and video. No class of service distinctions combined with indeterminate routing wreak havoc in the form of latency and jitter.

This is where MPLS shines. There are no public MPLS networks like the public Internet. They are all owned and operated by particular service providers on a fee basis. You sign up for the MPLS network that you want to use and the provider makes sure that you get first class service.

How is that done? Remember those “bar code” tags? The tags have the extra information about class of service and routing that tell the network how to handle each packet. There is no need for equipment on the network to examine IP or other protocol headers. The tag is all the tag switches or routers need to handle the traffic.

The result of this tagging process is that packets are handled differently depending on their needs. Voice and video conferencing traffic gets priority. Non-critical file transfers get a lower priority. Most of the time, congestion, latency and jitter are not a problem. Since the service provider knows everyone using the network, adequate resources can be provisioned to ensure that traffic from one customer doesn’t interfere with traffic from any other.

There’s another benefit to this tagging technology. It completely frustrates anyone trying to spy on the network traffic using IP tools. They won’t work because the network isn’t running the Internet Protocol. It just transports IP packets from point A to point B. Non-IP traffic gets the same treatment. That’s why MPLS means multi-protocol label switching. Any protocol can be accommodated and all have enhanced security from label switching technology and no public access. MPLS networks are often referred to as MPLS VPN or virtually private network.

Today’s MPLS networks have regional, national and international service footprints. They are easily accessed from just about anywhere using copper wireline or fiber optic connections. Pricing is very attractive, even when you only want to connect two far-flung locations. For multiple sites that need to communicate, MPLS is the go-to technology today.

Does an MPLS network service make sense for your WAN communication needs? Get competitive pricing and features for MPLS networks that support your business needs.

Electronic Medical Records and Connectivity Boost Healthcare Efficiency

One key to stemming the rise of health care costs and improving patient care is the move away from paper-based systems toward automation and electronic medical records. The beauty of electronic records is that once they are created, they can be stored, duplicated and transmitted far faster and less expensively than paper forms. Physicians and other health care providers also have the opportunity to get far more comprehensive information on a patient than what is provided by typical paper records.

Electronic medical records, also called electronic health records, include such things as prescriptions, diagnoses, and patient data. They also include electronic imaging files such as X-ray, CT, PET, MRI and ultrasound results. This dramatically increases the size of the files compared to what you’d expect from simply digitizing written forms.

The irony of moving to electronic medial records is that the ability to transfer files from location to location, a major advantage of keeping everything in electronic form, can actually get bogged down to the point where you miss the old paper forms. This is due to both the volume of traffic increasing due to more records moving through the system and the sheer size of records with images attached.

The solution is to increase network bandwidth. Your internal LAN may have been upgraded already to handle massive file transfers efficiently. The big bottleneck is generally the WAN links. These connections go to insurance companies, physicians offices, therapy facilities, and other health care locations. If they are off-campus, you’ll almost certainly be dealing with metro or long haul network connections.

The days when a T1 connection seemed as fast as you’d ever need are pretty much over in the health care industry. A minimum entry point is now typically 10 Mbps for a smaller organization. You may not be sending and receiving that many records, but you don’t want to wait all day for them to transfer. Hospitals and other larger facilities really need fiber optic connections. Gigabit Ethernet is not at all unreasonable or uncommon these days. The prices for this bandwidth level have dropped more than an order of magnitude over what you had to pay a few years ago. There is are more providers competing for your business and technologies such as Ethernet over Fiber that challenge traditional SONET fiber optic services.

Another major concern is security. While paper files can be put behind locked doors and very carefully distributed, electronic files can be accessed via network weaknesses by those who have no right to the information. This means that network security is paramount for any organization handling sensitive patient information. One new approach to protecting data is the Cloud Firewall Service offered by Integra Telecom. This is a perimeter based system that carefully regulates what can enter the network via Internet connections such as log-ins from remote users. Inter-office connections are secured through the Integra MPLS network or your own VPN.

In fact, many medical organizations are moving or at least considering a move to cloud based computing, storage and communications to reduce costs and provide the rapidly scaleable performance needed to handle varying workloads. This puts additional demands on your metro and wide area network connections plus the need for robust security in the cloud. It is projected that healthcare organizations could account for over 20% of the cloud computing market within 5 years.

Is your healthcare organization bogged down by slow network connections or looking to expand to meet rising demand? A number of major network service providers have packaged specifically tailored to meet the needs of healthcare organizations from physicians offices on up to the largest hospitals. Get features and prices on bandwidth and cloud services that are right for the size of your organization.

MPLS Network Design Supports Global Business

Many companies now have a business presence outside of the United States. This creates a need to connect these facilities back to headquarters and to other regional headquarters or satellite offices. What’s proving to be the best solution for enterprise-grade connectivity is international MPLS networks. Let’s take a look at why.

The low end approach to worldwide communications is the Internet. It already goes everywhere and connects just about everyone. All you need are a broadband connection at each location and you are good to go... or are you?

The problem with the Public Internet is that it serves anyone and everyone with the price of admission, which can even be a free WiFi hotspot. This includes lots of casual users updating their Facebook pages and downloading movies, businesses selling to the general public, and a significant number of bad actors. Malicious attacks on corporate data centers and personal computers continue to grow because it is a lucrative endeavor. This means you don’t dare transmit sensitive data or allow access to your corporate servers without some type of encryption to create a VPN or Virtual Private Network tunneling through the insecure Public Internet.

The other issue is performance. Everybody’s packets are treated exactly alike on the Internet. There’s no such thing as Class of Service (CoS) to put time sensitive packets such as VoIP telephony or video conferencing in a “fast lane.” If you want preferential treatment, you need to move to a private network.

Private point-to-point line services have been the traditional mainstay of private digital business communications. If you only need to connect two locations, then it seems logical to order a dedicated line between those locations. If you need to add more locations, then you are in the Wide Area Network (WAN) business. Typically you create a star network with corporate headquarters at the center and links to each remote location. You then decide the routing to determine how locations communicate to each other.

The private network is highly secure and performs very well because you have total control of all resources. Unfortunately, you have to run the network yourself, solve any connectivity issues that arise, and pay for all those expensive lines.

A more practical approach is to use a privately operated MPLS network to connect from 2 to any number of locations. These can all be within U.S. borders or they can be located in just about any country overseas. All you need is a last-mile connection from each location to the MPLS network. The network operator will manage bandwidth, latency, packet integrity and class of service. That’s right, MPLS networks are designed to support multiple classes of service to support even the most sensitive data streams.

MPLS stands for Multi-Protocol Label Switching. This isn’t an IP network, although it can transport IP data. It can also transport just about any other protocol needed. The core of the network is based on label switching routers using a proprietary protocol. That makes it inherently more secure than the Internet or other IP based networks. MPLS service is often touted as a VPN or Virtual Private Network, even though encryption is not required.

What’s available today that may not have been previously is a number of MPLS networks with worldwide reach. They have POPs (Points of Presence) in dozens or more countries and contract with local service providers for the last mile connection. This can be anything from DSL to T1/E1 to SONET fiber or Ethernet. Each location can have the connection that supports its needs. All connect to the core of the MPLS network, which is high speed fiber with massive bandwidth. You have a sense that you are the only one of the network, even though there are many simultaneous users transmitting important data. The fact that the core infrastructure is shared greatly reduces costs compared with an all private line solution.

Do you have a need to connect multiple business locations in a small geographical area, nationwide, or across international borders? If so, get quick pricing quotes for International MPLS Networks and compare cost and quality with your other connectivity options.

Secure Any Public WiFi Hotspot

You know how it is. You’re away from the office and the enterprise grade security on your corporate LAN. Or you’re out and about with your personal computer and away from the security of your encrypted WiFi router. You don’t have a 3G or 4G service for your laptop, but that doesn’t matter. There is WiFi available just about everywhere. The only problem is how much do you have to worry about these unsecured WiFi hotspots.

Worry a lot. Certainly, there isn’t some malicious hacker lurking in the dark corner of every coffee shop and restaurant. But how can you be sure that there isn’t somebody running Firesheep or another spyware program just when you want to send some private email or sensitive corporate data?

You can never be sure. The problem is that cybercrime has turned into big business and the tools needed to lurk on your conversations wirelessly are easy to obtain. You may never get hacked or you might lose sensitive data this afternoon. Isn’t it better to be safe than sorry?

The threat of someone lurking nearby with a packet sniffer on their otherwise innocent looking laptop has made many of us a bit paranoid. You may not care who’s watching you read the news or check the weather, but do you really want to open your email or log-into personal services in that environment? You can either pay up for 3G and 4G cellular services, which are harder to crack but not impossible, just forget doing much online when you are out and about, or set up Private WiFi for your computers.

What is Private WiFi? It’s a service that creates a Virtual Private Network (VPN) for anything you send over the Internet. If you work from home, your company may have set you up with a corporate VPN so that you can securely access company data. Usually, this involves installing special VPN encryption software on your PC that only works with similar software in the corporate data center.

What’s different about Private WiFi is that it isn’t limited to any particular business or any business at all. This is a VPN that secures your Internet connection, even over public WiFi networks. The way a VPN works is that it encrypts or scrambles the data you transmit and receive while it is on the wireless link. That way it is nearly impossible to decode, and way beyond the capability of the identity thieves sipping a late in the next booth. This is why they call it a virtual private network. It virtually creates a private connection for you across a public network.

The way Private WiFi works is that you install the VPN software on your computer and it creates an encrypted tunnel for your data anytime you use the Internet. That encrypted connection is between your computer and the secure Private WiFi servers. Those servers connect to the Internet using high speed connections. Private WiFi uses industry standard 128-bit encryption, the same technology used by your bank or credit card company. Everything you do on any WiFi or other Internet connection uses this VPN to protect your data.

Private WiFi works with both PCs and Macs and costs about ten buck a month. That’s a lot cheaper than other wireless access if you already have WiFi readily available to you. There are also family plans and corporate discounts available. If you aren’t sure this is for you, why not take a free 3-day trial and see how it works? Go ahead and start your Private WiFi Free 3-day trial now and stop worrying about who’s lurking at your favorite WiFi hotspots.

VPLS over MPLS Connects Locations Worldwide

MPLS networks are replacing older technologies such as frame relay and TDM point to point connections. It’s all part of the switchover from switched circuit to packet switched networks as a realization that legacy telephone traffic plays a minor role in worldwide voice, data and video communications.

MPLS is becoming the WAN of choice because of its versatility. The MP of MPLS stands for Multi-Protocol. MPLS networks aren’t fussy about the type of traffic they transport. Each packet gets a wrapper label and the LS or Label Switching makes sure it gets from source to destination intact.

There’s another networking technology that is also coming on strong. That is VPLS or Virtual Private LAN Service. VPLS is an Ethernet WAN service that connects multiple company LANs as if they were one much larger LAN that includes sites all over the world.

“That’s it,” you say. “I want VPLS not MPLS.”

Ah, not so fast. VPLS isn’t a network by itself. It needs MPLS networks to transport it. VPLS is a service running on MPLS. It’s one of those multi-protocols that MPLS networks carry so well.

Technically, VPLS uses a concept called pseudo-wires. Pseudo what? The name suggests what this is. It’s the emulation of a wired connection through a network. A real wire would be used for point to point private line service. You would lease the line and it would be “nailed up” or dedicated to your exclusive use for the duration of the lease. Pseudo wires are a way to establish private lines within packet switched networks. The idea is to create a transparent wire that can be used to carry a service from point A to point B.

Think of a pseudo-wire just like a length of Ethernet cable on your LAN. The wire doesn’t interfere with your protocol. The pseudo-wire doesn’t interfere with your protocol on the WAN. By establishing pseudo-wires through the MPLS network, it is possible to string virtual LAN wires hundreds or thousands of miles long. This is one of the tricks behind extending your LAN beyond the boundary lines of your property.

The other trick is for the network to emulate a switch or bridge to create a meshed network so that all locations can communicate as if they were on a bridged LAN. VPLS is a multi-point service. If all you wanted to do is connect two locations, you’d probably just get Ethernet Line Service using a pseudowire through the MPLS network.

The MPLS network can be thought of as a cloud that transports data and creates a multipoint switched network for interconnecting two or more business LANs. That can be anywhere from a few locations in the same state up to hundreds or thousands of locations across the globe. Because it is a cloud, you don’t have to worry about how the packets get from anywhere to anywhere. That’s the network provider’s job. All you need to do is get to that cloud from wherever you need a connection.

Those “last mile” connections can be a variety of protocols and a variety of bandwidths. If you want VPLS service, you’ll need to have Ethernet connections in the last mile. Those can be Ethernet over Copper, Ethernet over Fiber, Even Ethernet over DS1 or DS3 in situations where EoC isn’t available.

This brings up another option. If you don’t need layer 2 connectivity between LANs and simply want a WAN connection to transfer files between locations, you can set up a MPLS VPN service. This can use layer 3 routing just like you might create with a collection of private lines or over the Internet. One advantage is that you can use any protocol connectivity, such as T1 lines, DSL, SONET fiber optic and so on. Each location can have a different type of connection. The network will accept your packets, wrap them in MPLS labels and get them where they are supposed to go.

How about your WAN connectivity? Could you do better regarding bandwidth, quality of service or cost? Get competitive quotes for VPLS over MPLS and MPLS VPN network services to check available options for your business locations.




Note: World map graphic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Why International MPLS Connections Make Sense

Companies with multiple business locations have been discovering the advantage of MPLS network services for both domestic and international connections. In some cases, an MPLS network solution makes sense even with only two points to be connected. Let’s take a look at what MPLS have to offer, especially for cross-border connections, and when they make sense even for point to point service.

MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching is a type of network set up to transport traffic for multiple subscribers in a way that preserves security, class of service, and important network characteristics such as bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss. It is the closest thing to a universal network protocol that we have.

True, the Internet offers far wider connectivity than any other network. But the Internet is a public access facility based on network neutrality. There’s no such thing as class of service on the Internet. Indeed, it is a source of pride for Internet managers that all packets receive equal treatment.

That’s fine for a general purpose public resource that is primarily a transporter of non-time sensitive data and one-way media streaming. It’s completely unacceptable as a high performance transparent connectivity medium designed to support enterprise level computing and communications. MPLS networks are designed specifically to offer the class and quality of service you can’t get on a public network but also can’t afford to build yourself.

MPLS is known as an inherently VPN technology. While the service has multiple tenants to amortize the construction and operating costs of the network, the unique routing technology provides a level of security in itself. MPLS is based on label switching, once known as tag switching. It’s a packet switched network, but the packets can represent any protocol. The network doesn’t care what’s in the packet. It just needs to know where that packet needs to go and what class of service it should have. That’s defined upon ingress to the network, where the packet is assigned a label wrapper to encapsulate the original packet. The label stays on the packet until egress from the network when it is removed.

How does this create a virtually private network? First, IP routing is not used on an MPLS network. Anyone trying to snoop on the network will find that their IP-based tools are worthless. Second, access is strictly controlled. Unless you are a subscriber, you probably can’t even find a place to penetrate the network. The network operator sets up the accounts and only provides switched paths that are defined by the subscribers. Unless you are on the “list,” no data comes your way.

Even though other users have traffic on the same physical paths as you do, you are unaware of each other’s presence on an MPLS network. The network operator knows what services have been subscribed and maintains sufficient bandwidth to meet all guarantees without congestion. The switched paths are primarily determinate and don’t change unless there is a need to work around a temporary network outage. That greatly improves latency and jitter characteristics.

The end result is that you gain the performance of dedicated point to point private lines at a much lower cost that creating your own private WAN network. This is especially true when there are many locations to connect or when you need undersea fiber connections to Europe or Asia. With MPLS networks, you only need “last mile” connections for each location. The rest of the network is already in-place to transport your traffic. The cost advantages are such that for distances in the thousands of miles, it can be less expensive to order two local loops, one at each end, to access a MPLS network and then let the network handle the long haul portion of the path.

Who provides these International MPLS networks? Major carriers such as Level 3 Communications, AboveNet, XO Communications and Global Telecom and Technology have the fiber optic infrastructure in place to connect your facilities regardless of where they are located around the world.

Do you have a need to reach long distances for voice, data, or video, especially when multiple locations need to be tied together? If so, get prices and features for international MPLS network services specially tailored to meet your needs.



Note: World Map graphic courtesy of David Monniaux Wikimedia Commons.

AboveNet Offers Gigabit Ethernet For Enterprises

Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) has pretty much taken over the LAN in large and even medium size enterprises. But what about the WAN? Are you still hobbled by the slowdown that occurs when you are sending files beyond your network edge? Isn’t it time to consider Gigabit Ethernet for the WAN as well as the LAN?

Running a Gigabit LAN and using something like DS3 bandwidth or even OC3 fiber optic service for your MAN or WAN service is like connecting a drinking straw to a fire hose. The flow can’t help but slow to a trickle when it goes through that edge router. There once were good reasons why very modest WAN connection speeds were just fine. Today, there’s much less of a case to be made for order of magnitude or larger differences in LAN and WAN speeds.

What’s happened to demand higher connection speeds today? Computer networks were once strictly internal to a company. In fact, anything connected to the network from the outside aroused suspicion. If you wanted to transfer data somewhere, you used a reel of tape or a cassette. Slowly, data communication networks arose starting with dial-up modems and Frame Relay networks. Then came the Internet. It been a speed race ever since.

Now nearly every company has a dedicated broadband connection to the Internet and perhaps one or more VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) to connect with employees working for home or on the go. Companies with more than one site often have private line or MPLS network connections to tie everyone together. With the amount of data flying around, tapes and removable disk packs are yesterday’s means of data transfer. Today it is high speed network links.

Not only has computer technology changed, but so have business practices. Now nearly everything has some form of automation involved. Business productivity is leveraged upon real-time computer systems and electronic storage. Nobody at headquarters wants you to create a report and send it overnight mail anymore. They want a video conference presentation featuring you delivering the report live. Oh, and they want it right after lunch.

Beyond mere connectivity for transmitting files electronically instead of faxing or mailing paper, companies and their computing systems are becoming estranged. The data center used to be right down the hall or in the basement. Now it’s on the other side of the country and is owned by somebody else. More and more companies are buying their computing and even their telephone service through a cloud service provider. The LAN no longer connects you to the server racks. Now you have to go through a WAN connection. Does it make sense that the bandwidth that used to be good enough for a few overnight file transfers can’t begin to support real time business applications running in the cloud?

The idea of Gigabit Ethernet connections used to be a fantasy. Now it’s becoming a given. You need the high bandwidth connections to support the amount of data moving between organizational locations and back and forth with the cloud. If you are supporting financial trading, high performance SaaS, video conferencing or enterprise VoIP, you need not just high bandwidth but also low latency and jitter with minimal packet loss. In some cases, you may also require links to overseas locations with the same network characteristics.

Where do you go to get Gigabit level connectivity? AboveNet is a premier supplier of domestic and international fiber optic services. They are recommending moving to Ethernet rather than the legacy SONET fiber services. Why? SONET/SDH services are a legacy telephone company technology. They were designed to support trunking massive numbers of telephone conversations from office to office. These protocols can be made to work with computer networks but they are not directly compatible.

What is? Ethernet! The Ethernet that runs on your LAN can now traverse your WAN to the Internet or to another LAN on the other side of the country or across the Atlantic. This makes for a simpler and more efficient overall network setup. It also enables services such as layer 2 Ethernet LAN Service that bridges two distant LANs as if they were in the same building. Ethernet scales much faster and more granularly than SONET, allowing you to buy just the bandwidth you need now with the option to quickly scale up when the need arises. Best of all, Ethernet has a cost advantage over SONET/SDH. You get more bandwidth for the same money or pay less for the same service level.

If you are feeling the pinch from too small WAN connections, this would be an excellent time to check your current options for Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet services from AboveNet and other fiber optic carriers. You can get instant pricing for bandwidths up to 1 Gbps and rapid quotes with helpful consultation for all other services you may be interested in for your company.

WAN Providers Bandwidth Service Options

WAN bandwidth connections are all but necessary for doing business today. What you may not realize is the wide variety of WAN bandwidth options available. Let’s see what’s on the market now and how you can get prices quickly.

WAN or Wide Area Network bandwidth is how you connect from your business to other businesses and your customers. For the sake of simplification, we’ll include MAN or Metropolitan Area Network connections along with WAN. What they have in common is that they start where your LAN leaves off.

WAN bandwidth has always been the domain of telecom companies. You don’t have your own WAN. You lease what you need from a service provider. What’s changed recently is that many competitive providers have come into the WAN marketplace to compete with incumbent telephone companies and traditional long haul networking providers.

Perhaps the most popular of all WAN services is the T1 line. It’s been around for half a century and comes in various flavors. A basic data T1 offers 1.5 Mbps symmetrical bandwidth with full duplex. You can get a point to point private line to connect two business locations or a dedicated T1 Internet connection for business broadband. T1 lines are also popular as telephone trunks for PBX phone systems. The original T1 telephone line supports 24 business phone lines. The newer ISDN PRI offers 23 phone lines plus Caller ID and faster switching.

The direct competitor to T1 is Ethernet over Copper. EoC will typically give you twice the bandwidth for the same money. Most popular is 3x3 Mbps Ethernet running at 3 Mbps in both directions. Where available, the price is generally the same as a 1.5 Mbps T1 line. Ethernet over Copper is easily scaled up in bandwidth, so you can order 10 Mbps, 15 Mbps, 20 Mbps or higher bandwidth over twisted pair copper telco wiring. T1 lines can also be bonded to increase bandwidth up to about 12 Mbps at the most. The one limitation is EoC is that it is a distance sensitive technology that is mostly available in metropolitan areas where you are located close to the central office where your telco wiring terminates.

Another WAN option that is becoming popular with smaller businesses is business Cable broadband. You may be able to get 100 Mbps x 10 Mbps service for the same price as a T1 line. While these speeds are impressive, note that the service is not symmetrical. The upload speed is only a fraction of the download speed. That works well when you are using it to access the Internet for email, Web browsing and video downloads. Cable broadband is an Internet connection. However, you can set up a VPN (Virtual Private Network) for two Internet connected locations so that you can transfer files much like a point to point T1 line. Also note that Cable bandwidth is shared, not dedicated. Your bandwidth will vary considerably depending on what other Cable users are doing online.

Higher speed WAN bandwidth requires fiber optic lines. DS3 at 45 Mbps is generally transported on a fiber optic line, although your connection is via coaxial cable. Both traditional SONET and the newer Ethernet over Fiber are available if your building is lit for fiber. Once the fiber is in place, you can easily get anywhere from 100 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps for business applications. Carriers themselves often use 10 Gbps and 40 Gbps fiber for their network backbones.

Wireless connections are also possible. Low bandwidth fixed wireless uses 3G and 4G technology and is popular for retail credit card verification. Higher bandwidth fixed wireless can replace DS3 and Fast Ethernet wireline services but is generally limited to downtown business districts. Satellite broadband works where no other service is available.

For really wide area connectivity, consider an MPLS network. These have regional, national and international connectivity. You can get nearly any bandwidth you require and connect dozens, hundreds or thousands of business locations securely.

With all these options available, how do you choose? The best way is go through a telecom broker that represents dozens of different carriers and has an application that makes it easy to get pricing quickly. The GeoQuote tool from Telarus, Inc. does just that. For many options you can get WAN bandwidth pricing and availability instantly online. Other services will be manually quoted in short order to meet your requirements. With that information in hand, you can do the price/performance tradeoffs and choose what make the most sense for your particular situation.

Texas Fiber Optic Network Expansion

There are big things afoot in the Lone Star State. In this case, it's big network expansions from partnerships and mergers. The result is more options and fiber network availability for businesses located in Texas.

Transtelco is a major competitive provider with a fiber network that stretches from Houston to Los Angeles and dips into Northern Mexico to pick up Monterrey, Chihuahua, Nogales, and Tijuana. The have expansion plans for both Mexico and Texas routes.

Within Texas, PAETEC, another major competitive provider, has considerable fiber assets serving Dallas, Austin and Houston, to name a few of their Texas POPs (Points of Presence). PAETEC now has offices in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and The Woodlands.

What’s afoot is a joint venture between PAETEC and Transtelco that has PAETEC building out Transtelco’s fiber leg connecting El Paso and Temple. With half ownership in this project, PAETEC gains additional SONET ring diversity for its network across the southern US and into Mexico. They also have access to offer voice, Internet and fixed wireless to agencies of the state government that use services of the State of Texas Department of Information Resources.

What makes this situation even more interesting is that PAETEC has been acquired by Windstream Communication, a competitive carrier serving the southeast and midwest US, including fiber runs into Dallas, as well as a network that extends into Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia and Virginia. Windstream has major fiber connections planned into other states, plus existing data centers in Newton, Iowa, Brookfield, Wisconsin, Nashville, Tennessee, Atlanta, Georgia, Jacksonville, Florida, Charlotte, Cary, and Raleigh North Carolina, Ephrata and State College, Pennsylvania and Boston, Massachusetts. Windstream’s existing fiber network spans some 60,000 route miles.

Windstream offers MPLS network services based on a resilient optical core to service companies with multiple business locations. Their network offers VPN (Virtual Private Network) with VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) connectivity. It’s a fully meshed network that allows regional sites to exchange traffic without having to depend on a central hub server. For companies with converged voice and data networks, Windstream offers Real-Time QoS that ensures voice packets receive top priority to keep them from getting slowed down or held up by less sensitive data packets.

Do you need fast and reliable access to the Internet? Windstream offers Ethernet Internet with symmetrical bandwidth up to 1 Gbps. This is a dedicated connection that offers consistency you won’t get in shared cable connections and bandwidth that far exceeds the capability of T1 lines and DS3 connections. Windstream's service level agreement guarantees 99.99% uptime to ensure availability.

Do you have a business presence in Texas with a need for better voice or data connectivity than you have now? Get competitive fiber optic bandwidth quotes from PAETEC, Windstream and other competitive carriers serving Texas, the southern states, or the entire United States, with optional connections to international destinations.


Note: Map of Texas courtesy of WikimediaCommons.

Types of VPN Connections

Virtual private networking is heavily used in business. In fact, you probably have used a VPN connection today without even realizing it. It’s not a belt and suspenders service anymore. VPN connections are absolutely essential to prevent being robbed blind.

First, let’s take a look at private vs virtually private networks. Your hardwired LAN is a private network. It would take some real effort and a lot of risk for someone to tap into your network wiring and install a device to capture traffic. The same is true if you establish a wide area network or WAN using point to point private lines. A PTP T1 line falls into that category. While it is not impossible to sneak into your wiring closet or even the telephone company and put a tap on the line, it is so difficult that only those with the most secure requirements will go to extremes to protect against this type of attack.

What distinguishes a private network is that 100% of the traffic is yours and yours alone. You are not sharing the lines with anyone else. The advantage to a private network is inherent security. The disadvantage is cost. You pay for all the construction, maintenance and monthly lease fees. It’s unlikely that your private network will be fully loaded at all times. Whatever capacity is unused goes to waste.

Contrast the private network with a public network like the Internet. They are polar opposites. The Internet allows anyone and everyone access by design. Traffic on the Internet is everybody in the pool. Your packets are intermingled with everyone else’s. Even so, a wired connection to the Internet isn’t the worst situation. That belongs to the unsecured wireless network. No need to plant malware in someone’s computer when everything they are doing is perfectly visible on any WiFi enabled computer within range. You are most vulnerable reading private unencrypted emails in a popular public hotspot. Anyone with a laptop computer and some easy to obtain spyware can be reading your messages right along with you.

It seems like such a crying shame that the one network that any employee can access at home or while traveling is such a security nightmare. That’s where the technique of encryption becomes valuable. It doesn’t matter if someone is monitoring your traffic if all they see is gibberish. You encrypt your message at one end and decrypt it at the other end and you have a created what is known as a secure tunnel through the Internet. The public network has now become a virtually private network. It’s not a private network because you are still sharing the transport with many others. It’s virtually private because no one can read your traffic and make any sense out of it.

There are two popular methods of creating Internet or IP VPNs. One is IPsec or Internet Protocol security. The other is SSL or Secure Socket Layers. IPsec is based on software installed in both the company server and the client computer. IPsec encrypts and decrypts each packet, so once you have it installed you have a virtually private line to the company no matter where you hooked to the Internet. Of course, you need to use the specific laptop or other computer set up to work with this system. You can’t just go to any computer and connect back to headquarters.

If you want to do that, you need SSL (Secure Socket Layer). The beauty of SSL is that the software is already built into Web browsers and some email programs. SSL has been popularized for ecommerce and online banking. When you go to a SSL enabled webpage, you’ll notice that the http:// has become https:// The “s” means secure page. To access it you need a user account ID and a password at a minimum. Some sites go further and ask personal challenge questions or display special graphics that give you confidence you are logged into the correct site.

For corporate wide area networks, an alternative to private lines is the MPLS network. These are multi-tenant networks that spread the cost of building and running the system among many users. MPLS networks are considered VPNs because they use a proprietary label switching protocol that isn’t compatible with IP tools. This unique protocol plus access controlled to a limited number of business clients and not the general public give MPLS networks an enhanced level of security.

Do you need private or virtually private network connects to conduct business? If so, compare VPN options and prices to help decide which mix of network techniques is right for your company.

Fiber Optic Direct Connections To The Cloud

The Internet offers an extensive and cost effective means to access services in the cloud. What it doesn’t offer is consistent low latency, low jitter and high bandwidth performance. It was never intended to. The Internet’s claim to fame is universal connectivity. If your business processes in the cloud suffer from inconsistency or have become sluggish compared to when they were hosted onsite, you could benefit from a direct connection to the cloud.

One of the most popular cloud services is the Amazon AWS Cloud Computing Platform. Leveraging the enormous computing facilities owned by Amazon, users can pay as they go for application hosting, Web hosting, backup and storage, content delivery, enterprise IT applications and scalable database solutions. This nearly unlimited resource set can place a considerable load on typical bandwidth links used by corporations. It gets worse as you move more and more of your business processes to the cloud while leaving your employees in-place, often thousands of miles away.

The Internet works just fine for e-commerce, with thousands or millions of individual customers accessing centralized servers from their homes and offices. It’s also well suited for accessing company resources by remote workers and traveling employees. Where it starts to stumble is when you expect consistent real-time performance between the cloud and your data center or user base similar to what you get from hardwired connections in-house. The closest thing to your LAN is a high performance direct connection.

There are a couple of ways to achieve that direct connection. Amazon is currently offering direct connection to its cloud at Equinix’s Ashburn, VA and Silicon Valley, CA colocation facilities. Equinix provides colocation facilities for over 4,000 enterprises, cloud, content and financial companies through its network of colo centers. If you happen to have your equipment in their Ashburn or Silicon Valley facility, a simple cross connect is all that’s needed to hook your servers to Amazon’s.

If you are not collocated in an Equinix data center, you’ll need a WAN connection. AWS has two approved carriers that can make the connection. One is Level 3 Communications, a leading international fiber-based carrier with services to over 125 international markets. The other is AboveNet, Inc., another leading fiber optic carrier with 2.3 million metro fiber miles and connections in place to more than 450 data centers. AboveNet is offering connections to the AWS Direct Connect service at 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps.

AWS Direct Connect network service works withe the same AWS services that you would otherwise access over the Internet. These include Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). You can use AWS Direct Connect to create multiple logical connections between your network and Amazon VPC. You can even establish multiple VPCs over this connection if you have enough bandwidth available.

AWS Direct Connect is flexible enough to scale your connectivity as your needs change. Each connection offers 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps connectivity and you can add multiple connections to increase capacity. Amazon suggests that this approach is better than using VPN hardware that frequently can’t support data transfer rates above 4 Gbps.

Have you already moved to the cloud or anticipate such a move and are concerned that your current connectivity can’t get the job done? Perhaps a direct connection can give you the performance that you need. Get pricing and bandwidth options for fiber optic cloud connections now.