There has been a growing trend toward the reduction of operational computing costs in small and medium sized businesses for the last 15 years. Drops in hardware and software costs have fueled this reduction. Enterprise computing has come down to the smallest of enterprises. The low cost and easy access to high speed internet has accelerated thegrowth of iternet applications. Both of these trends have lowered costs.

The internet is providing the means for a wide variety of business activities such as transaction processing, email, and file backup to occur. There has been a growth of intercompany Virtual Private Networks which can span the city, or the globe. People today are using fax,voice as well as video communication which all runs over the public internet.

The internet provides immense opportunity, security not withstanding. With the cost of entry being small the growth of internet interaction has accelerated between individuals either through instant messaging or socialnetworking. Indeed a number of subscribers of Skype are making free net calls al over the world.

The challenge in using the internet is thati t is different things to different providers depending on where the last mile connection is. The last mile referring to the telephone company or cable company cable connection running to the location you are in. Beacuse of this it is not wise to run all of your connectivity off this one access. Enterprises using mission critical applications are wise to diversify their connections for maximum reliability and protection.

Voice cannot experience packet loss or dropped connections. Whereas Web browsing, email, crm, file transfer and backup applications can rely on an unreliable internet connection as long as the connection is mostly stable. The key to understand is that if the internet drops the connections even if it is for 2 seconds all of your time sensitive communications could be dropped. Time sensitive applications include telephone call and web conferencing. So when deploying these types of services broadly it is important to have in your plan a contingency plan that says we may need to try different service providers and different technologies for our internet last mile as we deploy our solution out to the field. It may also be important to move some of these applications back to point-to-point connections to ensure the high quality of these services.

Not every internet connection is created equally, even from the same provider. Cost savings in one area, may need to be re-invested in to new areas to allow the organization to do more with less but with multiple options for our security and access.

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