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.

Can You Benefit From New Cloud Networks?

You’ve been reading articles, Tweets and blog posts about cloud computing for some time now and wondering if there is any way that this new technology can help your business. It seems like so many of the cloud offerings are targeted toward very large corporations. Is there any way that cloud services can work for the small and medium size companies?

In fact, the cloud has as much or more potential for reducing cost, speeding processes and improving productivity at small to medium size operations than for gigantic companies. Why? Because large companies have large budgets and large IT staffs that can build their own private clouds if they want to. The smaller company finds it harder to come up with the capital investment and staffing budgets to support this type of innovation.

What the SMBs (Small to Medium size Businesses) need is a cloud solutions supplier who already has the infrastructure and expertise to take them to the cloud. What you need is New Cloud Networks.

What’s different about New Cloud Networks is that they are specializing in the needs of small and medium size companies. They operate their own enterprise quality data center with full server hardware redundancy, dual fiber optic bandwidth connections, two redundant power feeds, redundant uninterruptible power supplies and diesel power to backup the backup power supplies. That gives them a robust hardware platform with 99.999% guaranteed uptime (5 nines).

All of this is virtualized to make it available to even the smallest business. The beauty of virtualization is that you don’t need to invest in more hardware resources than you need just because there is a certain entry level setup to have a data center at all. In fact YOU don’t make any capital investment at all. That’s been taken care of by the cloud vendor. What cloud service providers do is create a massive data center large enough to serve the needs of as many clients as they anticipate. They divvy up this capacity to each client based on how much is needed. The economy of scale means that you can have as much or little capacity as you need and only have to pay for what you actually use.

This is a more profound change in the technology approach for business than it appears at first glance. The idea of not having to raise capital to go out and buy servers and the data center infrastructure that supports them is certainly an advantage. Perhaps even more of an advantage is the agility of being able to scale up and scale down to match business conditions. You can’t really do that when you have long lead times for the procurement and installation process. You can when your resources are in a virtualized environment that takes only a few keystrokes to adjust. Now expenses can track business activity like never before.

What sort of cloud products are available through New Cloud Networks? It starts with cloud computing, of course. That means elastic computing resources that are quickly scaled up and down. Compute cycles are only part of the solution, though. To match virtual servers, you need virtualized storage. This is an infinitely deep pool of disk storage that can be allocated to your company as needed. You don’t go out and buy drives any more. You simply order up more virtual drives. The physical redundant hard drives are already in place and spinning. Likewise, bandwidth is elastic and available to the extent needed to support your computing and storage cloud. There are no long lead times to install a bigger data pipe. You simply use more of the massive capacity that is already wired-in.

By picking the right solutions provider, your small to medium size business can, indeed, gain the benefits of the cloud revolution. Start small with backup storage in the cloud, email hosting, or perhaps a dedicated server or two. Once you see how reliable and cost effective cloud solutions are, chances are you’ll never go back to buying, maintaining and upgrading your own racks of equipment. Get competitive cloud services pricing and complementary consulting by cloud experts now to see just how much you can benefit.

How The Cloud Provides Virtualization For The SMB

Virtualization has been a hot topic within enterprise data centers for years. It’s a matter of getting more out of what you already have. Virtualization can turn a lightly loaded server into many smaller servers that you’d otherwise have to buy. It can ease the burden of a heavily loaded server across many hardware platforms, avoiding the expense of one monstrous hardware platform. That’s great for large corporations, but what about small and medium size businesses. Is there any way they can gain the efficiencies of virtualization?

There is now. Just look to the cloud. Virtualization is the magic behind the curtain that makes the cloud a practical reality. Clouds are nothing more than extremely large data centers set up to serve many tenants. The principle is that any customer will perceive having access to infinite resources and a sense of being the only user if the data center is engineered correctly. The practical way to do that is with virtualization.

Every aspect of the cloud is virtualized. It starts with the servers used as computing resources. The racks and racks full of physical servers are virtualized into hundreds or thousands of virtual servers. What happens on one virtual server stays on one virtual server. As long as there are enough physical resources to support the demand for as many virtual servers as customers activate, users have no idea how many other customers are sharing the same physical assets or what the maximum number of virtual servers can be.

The same is true for storage, also virtualized, and bandwidth, which has always worked well as a virtualized resource. Even software can be virtualized when running on the cloud. This has led to the Software as a Service or SaaS model. Customers perceive having their own installation of a software package, although in practice they are one out of many.

So, what does this have to do with the Small and Medium Business (SMB)? Once you are relieved from the burden of ownership, the barriers to entry for fairly sophisticated computing services shrink considerably. Few companies have the multi-million dollar capital resources to go out and build secure, environmentally controlled data centers with layers of redundant power, and then populate these spaces with rack after rack of the latest hardware. They also need to budget to hire the staff that makes all of these resources work together reliably and keep on top of patches, upgrades and troubleshooting.

The cloud moves all of that cost and effort from your hands to those of a dedicated service provider who is in business to manage the cloud and nothing else. They’re not trying to run a manufacturing, marketing or healthcare company. They’re in business to run a cloud and run it for excellent performance. By purchasing your IT services from a cloud provider instead of replicating a data center on-premises, the smaller a company you can be and still afford the service. It’s now possible for even “mom & pop” operations to use cloud services from the day the business opens and grow their IT right along with their business.

Here’s something else that SMB operations are finding is better off in the cloud than on-site. That’s PBX telephone systems. How many companies have the expertise to run their own phone systems? Many contract with VARs (Value Added Resellers) and consultants to buy, install and maintain an in-house telephone system. Send all that to the cloud and all you need onsite is the phones and perhaps a provider installed managed gateway. They even take care of the trunk lines that connect to the public telephone system.

What’s all this cost? Cloud services are sold on a pay-as-you-go basis. Many are prices by the month for each user or “seat,” as they are called. Computing is sold by the number of virtual servers and quantity of storage per month or even per hour. Unlike normally contracted services, cloud resources are easily increased or decreased. Often you can do this through a Web-based control panel for your account. Your bill is automatically adjusted as you add and subtract resources.

Are you finding it too hard to acquire the computing and communication resources you really need to be competitive? Consider getting those resources as services from the cloud and pay only for what you use now with option of rapidly scaling up when business conditions dictate. Compare prices and options from multiple cloud service providers now and compare with the expense of trying to do it all yourself.

Broadview Networks OfficeSuite Brings The Cloud To SMB

As a small to medium size business, you’d like to embrace cost saving technologies like Enterprise VoIP, private IP networking and cloud services. But, oh, the investment to get into this game. You take another look at Internet-based services, but have serious concerns about quality and reliability of service. If only small to medium businesses without huge IT staffs could get the good stuff. But, wait, you can!

You can, indeed, upgrade to the latest in sophisticated telecommunications services without the big investment in dollars and staffing to do it all yourself. Broadview Networks has exactly the service you need in their OfficeSuite. It IS your office at one or many locations. You get the functionality of an enterprise-grade PBX or key telephone system. You get easy administration to add stations, sites and users through an ordinary Web browser. You get the ability to connect satellite and regional offices across the country with your main office using the same system and network. You get seamless communications with home-based employees and mobile professionals who have the same features and functionalities that are available on their office phones. You even get Internet access.

What you don’t get is grief and capital expenditures. OfficeSuite is a hosted VoIP system. That means that all the expensive and hard to maintain switching and server equipment is located in a Broadview Networks facility. They have the telecom talent to keep everything working 24/7 and enough resources to ensure that you can scale up your operation any time you want. What you have in your facility is telephones and computers connected to your 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps Ethernet LAN.

Now, be careful here. Not all hosted PBX solutions are the same. Some try to minimize costs by pressing the Internet into service as a telephone trunk line. Broadview Networks operates its own private network built on a redundant fiber-optic backbone. The difference between sending sensitive traffic, like telephone calls, over the wild and wooly Internet and sending them over a carefully controlled private network is the difference between take-what-you-get and dependable high quality performance. Broadview Networks can interconnect multiple locations through their converged MPLS network that maintains strict quality control on voice and data streams.

With advanced technology and quality networking, OfficeSuite offers not only the usual telephone features, but exciting extras that can improve your productivity. Hot Desking lets employees move around the office and between locations. They simply log in to a phone like they would log into an Internet account. Click to Dial lets you click on phone numbers in your Microsoft Outlook contact manager to immediately activate a speakerphone and call the contact selected. Get voicemail notifications and messages from any phone and receive messages through e-mail, even on your smartphone. Decide where to send calls if you can’t pick up. Inbound callers reach your Auto Attendant that prompts them to user extensions and company directories.

Are you ready for a more sophisticated phone system, or perhaps one that is easier to manage and doesn’t require you to run to the bank for a capital loan? Then get complementary consulting and quotes on OfficeSuite and other quality hosted PBX phone systems. You’ll likely find that trying to be your own phone company is more trouble that it is worth.

T-1 Bandwidth Suits the SMB

The SMB or Small to Medium size Business is no longer a stand-alone entity, even when independently owned and operated. Business operations from small insurance offices to the ubiquitous QSRs or Quick Service Restaurants have become either Internet enabled or Internet dependent. Why? Because the benefit to cost ratio is so favorable.

The most popular digital communication connection for SMBs is the T1 line. It is a business-grade regulated telecommunication service that has dropped in price over the past few years due to increasing demand and fierce competition among providers. In some cases, you'll pay less than half for T1 service than you did five years ago. How many of your other business expenses have done that?

T-1 bandwidth is a solid 1.5 Mbps in both directions, upload and download. It is a precisely synchronized transmission protocol that can be thought of like a water pipe. Regardless of how much is currently being used, a set capacity is always available. If you need more, it's as simple as bonding in additional T1 lines to multiply your available bandwidth by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or more times.

So how do small and medium businesses employ their T-1 bandwidth? In addition to the obvious applications such as email and Web browsing, many businesses use their T1 lines to order supplies, upload accounting reports to a main office, check inventory at remote warehouses, monitor security cameras and enable telecommuting by home workers or employees on the road.

Many companies have become completely or partially Internet based operations. E-commerce is a typical application, so that customers can order from an online catalog anytime, even when stores are closed. Sales organizations have the ability to "carry the business" to a customer's office. Product information can be displayed at the customer's desk using laptop computers equipped with cellular broadband cards. Stock can be checked and orders entered right on the spot.

Other companies have realized cost savings by integrating their telephone and Internet data through a single T1 line. There are a couple of ways to do this. Integrated T1 Service is a specialized product that allocates T-1 bandwidth between voice and data. Any bandwidth not needed for telephone calls is automatically available for Internet use. One nice feature of Integrated T1 Service is that it works with your current telephone system, even if it is a key telephone system with a half-dozen analog phone lines.

Another approach is to use a single T1 dedicated Internet data line to support a VoIP telephone system and multiple Internet users. The VoIP supplier connects to the in-house iPBX system via the Internet. IP security cameras can be also be accessed via the Internet from managers' homes or remote security services.

Where data security is concerned, SMBs can still use the Internet as a convenient WAN or Wide Area Network. Information is protected from prying eyes by encrypting it during transmission. This approach is often referred to as a VPN or Virtual Private Network.

Another use for T1 lines is for private point to point connections. Very typical is a business with multiple locations that uses P2P T1 lines to interconnect all its telephones and/or send data directly between locations.

Is your small to medium size business in need of upgraded broadband service? Would you like to see if you can get better pricing on the T1 service you are already using? If so, you can find out in less than a minute what services and prices are available for your business location using our T1 Rex automated online T-1 bandwidth search.