Enterprise Communications Services To The Cloud

There’s a great migration underway. This is a technical migration, from the public switched telephone network and private branch exchanges to cloud based communications services. XO communications is a leader in cloud communication services. Here’s why they predict that in the next few years 60% of companies will move close to a third of their voice communications to the cloud...



If you would like a complementary consultation and competitive quotes for your enterprise communication needs, we can offer you prompt and courteous service through our affiliated Telarus product specialists.

So, is it time to rethink your approach to voice communications, such as business telephone? You know that the upgrades you want to make are going to cost a fortune in up-front capital at a time when big capital outlays are frowned upon. You could just let the whole thing go until the economy picks up steam and money flows like water. But...

Here’s the problem. You want and need the productivity improvements you can get with unified communications right now. You may also suspect that you are spending too much on operations and maintenance, and rightly so. The dilemma is that with traditional approaches you can’t afford to make the changes that will give you the available savings.

Now, here’s the solution. It’s called communications as a service. Instead of trying to be in the telephone business yourself, turn that over to experts in enterprise level VoIP over MPLS networks. That way, you can get all of your many business locations on the same network using the same equipment with the same connectivity. You can get niceties like HD voice and video, mobility integration, plus calling features you don’t have now. Best of all, you pay as you go with a predictable per-user monthly cost.

No need to stay mired in limbo. XO cloud communications and other competitive carriers offer migration paths where you can integrate what you have now while you gradually shift to the new cloud solution. Eventually, you just pull the plug on the old PBX and PSTN trunk lines when you no longer need them.

Does pay as you go sound like a better business model for these days than invest and wait years for a payback? If so, you owe it to yourself to take a few minutes and get a complementary consultation and competitive quotes for enterprise services in the cloud.

Get Your Building Fiber Lit For Free

There are some tremendous deals on fiber optic bandwidth these days. Many companies would dearly love to move up to Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps, GigE at 1000 Mbps or even 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The one problem is that their building isn’t lit for fiber optic service yet. When they see the construction cost quote to bring in the fiber, the up-front cost is just too high in this economic environment. But, what if you could get your building fiber lit for free? Would that change your bandwidth plans?

It’s absolutely possible that you can upgrade to high speed fiber services without having to pay construction costs. The little known secret is that some competitive carriers see such an opportunity in the demand for higher bandwidth services that they are willing to put up money for construction costs themselves. One carrier is willing to build up to 1,500 feet of fiber if that’s what it takes to get you on their network.

Oh, but do you have to pay extra in monthly lease fees to get the free hookup? No way. In fact, you may be surprised at how much fiber lease costs have come down lately. If you haven’t gone out for quotes in a few years, you are dealing with pricing so obsolete that it’s a joke. You need to get a new set of competitive quotes right now.

Everything is pulling in the same direction now for fiber optic bandwidth. First, demand is increasing by leaps and bounds due to the increased use of video in business, including video conferencing. Business automation is making employees more productive than ever, but it comes with an increased need for bandwidth to connect to providers. Cloud services are adding additional pressure on WAN connections to provide response times similar to what you experience with a local data center.

We normally think that when something is in high demand, the price goes up not down. Just the opposite is happening in the network bandwidth market. Why? Increased demand has encouraged competitive carriers to build-out their regional, national and international fiber networks. Many have embraced new service options, such as MPLS networks and Carrier Ethernet. What every competitive carrier wants is more customers to connect to their massive core networks. That means getting more buildings on-net.

What on-net means is that your particular building is on the network of a particular fiber optic carrier. If you are on-net, that carrier has fiber strands coming into your building and terminating in equipment that the carrier provides. From there, they can connect you and other tenants in the building, if there are any, to whatever speed and format service you require.

Many carriers don’t want the aggravation of butting heads with competitors in the same building. Instead, they’ll try to find nearby buildings that aren’t already lit and get in there first. Once established, it’s easy for them to sell and keep customers. Fiber bandwidth is nearly unlimited, so scaling services up and down is no trouble at all. Do you need to move up from 100 Mbps to 500 Mbps? You might be able to make that happen in a matter of hours if you already have a Gigabit Ethernet port installed. Just call the carrier and tell them you want a speed increase. They can likely do that without having to change out any equipment at all.

It’s a real land-rush situation for competitive carriers, since something like 12% of business locations are already lit for fiber service. You are in the majority if you don’t already have fiber optic bandwidth. But if you are close enough to a carrier point of presence, you may be able to get those fiber services cheaper than you ever thought possible. Why not see what opportunities are available and then decide how much you can upgrade and still stay within your budget? Get instant online fiber optic prices for Carrier Ethernet from 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps now. Other services will be quoted promptly, including construction costs if any. You may be in a better spot to get affordable fiber service than you ever thought possible.

Hosted VoIP Solutions Include New Phones

When we think of cloud services, it’s fairly easy to imagine the server racks down the hall being replaced by a much larger set somewhere out there. Similarly, it’s easy to see that the PBX in the telecom room disappears one day to be replaced by a much larger hosted PBX system in the cloud. But what about all those phone wires that used to plug into the PBX FSX and FSO ports? What do they plug into now?

They need to do what the network connections do. Moving data servers outside is made easier by connecting the LAN to an edge router that has a high capacity WAN line to your cloud service provider. When you outsource the PBX, the same thing needs to happen. In this case, the connection is called a SIP Trunk. Yes, it’s possible to terminate the SIP trunk into a myriad of analog phone ports so you can just plug in the phones you now have and keep going as if nothing has changed. But if you do that, you’ll miss out on one of the big advantages of upgrading to Hosted PBX service. That’s all the special features enterprise VoIP has to offer.

A big cost saver with VoIP, especially for medium and large organizations, is the consolidation of the separate phone and computer networks into one converged voice and data network. The phones are now like computer peripherals. There’s an RJ-45 jack on the back that connects to the network just like a PC. The phone has its own MAC address. You can move it around on the network and still have it ring at the same phone number. Forget rewiring or reprogramming like you have to do with standard phones when you make changes.

Analog phones can be made to work like IP phones by using an adaptor box called an ATA (Analog Telephone Adaptor). This is something of a kludge because the phone still has only the rudimentary features it had before. That’s why the ATA approach is only used for residential, home office and very small business situations. For every other application, the right thing to do is bite the bullet and move up to IP phones, also called SIP phones. These are telephones designed to run on the converged network and make use of productivity features you can get with networked telephony.

If you are designing your own in-house enterprise grade VoIP telephone system, you’ll need to budget for new phones as well as the IP PBX equipment. Count up the number of desks and wall phones, multiply by the cost of each IP Phone at several hundred dollars per, and your eyes may pop out at the total investment required. You can put together a capital investment plan and go face the bankers or take the alternative approach of pay-as-you-go.

Who let’s you pay by the month for your complete telephone service? Hosted PBX providers, that’s who. The pay for usage model is what’s making cloud computing such a hot service these days. There’s no reason telephony can’t be put on the same basis. The one variable is the telephone sets that remain at your business, not in the cloud. You can buy those, of course, or you can have the lease cost included in your per-seat pricing for the system. That way you get brand new sophisticated desk phones that are guaranteed to be compatible with the hosted phone service. You also have one provider to deal with for everything. If you’ve ever had to referee between phone set manufacturers and carriers blaming each other for something not working, you’ll recognize the advantage of having “one neck to wring.”

Would you like to avoid the never-ending capital appropriation and procurement cycle in favor of just paying for what you need as you need it? Hosted VoIP may be the way to go for your business. Get competitive quotes and features for hosted VoIP telephone systems and compare with the what you have now.

Virtual Hosted PBX VoIP

There are various ways to implement VoIP. Some of them are excellent, others fall short of the mark. What you had in mind for VoIP in the first place was to save money and gain features. What you want to ensure is that the quality of your voice conversations will not suffer in the process.

That’s a tall order, but the technology is available to do exactly what you have in mind. The problem is that it can be a little tricky to get working properly. You can greatly increase your chances of having a successful implementation by getting some help with the installation. Not just by hiring a consultant, mind you. Move the tricky and expensive aspects of VoIP telephony to an expert provider and avoid the engineering and maintenance nightmare completely.

That’s the idea behind Virtual PBX systems, also called Hosted PBX. The PBX system itself has long been a fixture at most medium and larger size companies. There may not even be anyone on staff who remembers the day when all you had was a few phones and the telephone company took care of all that fancy switching. In a way, we’re moving back to that model of having just phones within the company and doing the connections elsewhere. The difference is mostly in the technology.

The first thing to know about virtual phone systems is the disappearance of the traditional telco wiring. That was the standard connection for analog telephones. Digital phones don’t need their own separate telephone network. They can ride along on the Ethernet LAN, along with all the computing equipment.

Phones do need a connection to your telephone service provider. That’s called a SIP Trunk. A SIP Trunk works like the ISDN PRI or T1 Phone line that connects to an in-house PBX system. The advantage of the SIP trunk is that it transports packets of all types. These can be voice packets from a telephone or data packets from the Internet. Some of the packets are switching signals for the telephones. They use a standard called Session Initiation Protocol which is where the term SIP comes from.

The phones that you use on the network are called IP phones. They look like a standard business phone with an RJ-45 network connector on the back in place of the usual telephone line jack. They are either powered by AC adaptors or over the network itself. This is called POE for Power over Ethernet. Some Ethernet switches offer this capability and save you the trouble of using AC adaptors. The switch can also provide battery backup so you can use your phones during a power outage.

The PBX system itself is located at the service provider. A hosted PBX or cloud PBX system is much larger than anything you’d buy for your own use. It’s operated and maintained by a dedicated staff so you don’t have to worry about outages, repairs or upgrades. What you have is a portal to that PBX system so that you can register your phones and decide on how the features work. All the in-house conversations are on the network so there aren’t per-minute charges. For calls that go outside, the hosted PBX has lines to the public telephone network. The economy of scale is so large that you can often get unlimited local and long distance calling as part of the per-seat monthly charge.

Are you considering a phone system installation, replacement or upgrade? Before you simply go the traditional route, check Virtual Hosted PBX VoIP service prices and see if it makes a lot more sense to rent rather than buy your business telephone system.

Managed Hosting in Clouds and Colos

When it comes to hosting, you have all sorts of options. Most individuals and smaller companies opt for shared hosting. It provides decent performance at a rock bottom price. Once you get too big for shared Web hosting, you’ve got a decision to make. Do you do it yourself or opt for a managed solution?

There was a time when you needed the savvy to run your own web server to even get a site up and running. Now that Linux and Windows hosting has become so common and standardized, there are lots of places to get hosted. Even larger companies that insisted on maintaining control by buying their own servers and rack mounting them in their own temperature controlled data centers are taking a second look at colocation and clouds. Why? It’s mostly about cost but also about resources.

One of the big resource bottlenecks today is bandwidth. Certainly, carriers have kept up with offerings at GigE, 10 GigE, OC-768, wavelengths and dark fiber. What they haven’t done is provide universal access. While competitive fiber optic networks are expanding their service footprints every day, the majority of business locations still aren’t lit and aren’t likely to be in the near future. Ethernet over Copper bridges the gap for some. Speeds are up to 200 Mbps now. EoC is distance limited, however, so that your best chance for service is in a downtown business district.

Move to a colocation facility or cloud service, however, and your bandwidth issues may be over. They may not be if you need a high bandwidth pipe between your facility and the cloud. But if most of your bandwidth demand is coming from Internet users rather than in-house users, colos and clouds look pretty attractive. Cloud providers locate with the same facility at major carriers to ensure themselves of almost unlimited bandwidth. You can do the same thing by packing up your high bandwidth demand servers and shipping them to a colo facility. The best deals are where multiple carriers have established points of presence and are willing to bid for your business.

Another attraction of colocation is jettisoning the capital investment and operating costs associated with running your own data center. The colo has high security, backup power, environmental control and a tech support staff available 24/7. You need to provide the same things. Economy of scale favors the colocation company with its much larger facility and lots of customers to amortize the cost.

Smaller companies may find that they can’t afford an around the clock tech staff nor the investment required to build or expand an in-house data center. A move to a nearby colo center can get them the facilities they need for a monthly fee. But why stop there? Perhaps it makes even more economic sense to forget about having your own hardware at all. Why not pay as you go on everything?

This is the appeal of everything-as-a-service. Hedge your bets by renting rather than buying. You can do that at many colocation centers now. They’ll put a server in the rack for you and keep it maintained. It’s just like having your own hardware except that when you don’t need it anymore, you just walk away. Need a bigger server? Don’t buy one. Simply upgrade your colo service.

The cloud does the colo one better. The cloud philosophy is “why commit to any particular hardware at all?” Why, indeed? In the cloud all services are virtualized. You don’t need to know or care what they’ve mounted in the racks. What you are concerned about is how many instances of virtualized servers you need at the moment. If you find that your demands fluctuate, you can increase or decrease the number of servers or amount of storage almost instantly. The well of resources to tap is nearly unlimited.

The problem now is how to sort out the options. Shared hosting is nearly a commodity these days. Get competitive quotes for colocation and cloud hosting services for your IT operations and then compare with what it costs you to provide the same value in-house.

Cloud vs Premises Contact Center Costs

Many very small businesses need nothing more than a local or toll free number to take customer calls. Medium and larger companies have a sufficient prospect and customer base that they no longer ask whoever is behind the counter to take the calls. They’ve specialized that function, installed dedicated technology and moved it into its own office space known as a contact center. There’s a certain cost associated with contact centers and it’s hard to reduce... or is it?

Up until recently, the only other option was to outsource the function on or off shore. Offshore contact or “call” centers have developed a tarnished reputation from overly ambitious efforts to recruit agents with weak English language skills and/or inadequate technical or procedural understanding. Companies now promote their in-house expert customer service staff as a competitive advantage.

But what about the costs? Is there any way to make in-house contact centers more competitively priced with shipping the function offshore? Fortunately, the answer is yes.

The way you can attack the cost monster is with a combination of lower capital and operating expenses plus productivity improvements. The tools to do that are the latest technology located in the cloud.

Traditional contact centers are what is known a premises-based. They’re either a department within your building or located in a facility by themselves. The technology is an in-house PBX phone system that manages all the agent phones and all the outside lines. Newer facilities may have an IP PBX phone system, which serves the same function but is easier to interface to computer systems so that agent’s screens can automatically display customer data in a “screen pop.”

PBX and IP PBX equipment is expensive to buy and costly to maintain. As these systems get older, technology passes them by and they don’t have all the latest features. It also gets harder to find replacement parts and even technicians who understand the nuances of that particular piece of equipment. Eventually, in frustration, capital is allocated to purchase a new system and the cycle starts all over.

The new alternative approach is outsourcing, but this time it’s the equipment not the agents. You keep the people you know and trust right where they are. What you unload is the infrastructure that doesn’t add value on its own. It’s just a tool, a means to an end. By using a cloud-based contact center solution all of the clap-trap moves “out there,” while you have the same or much better ability to serve your customers and sales prospects.

inContact is a trail-blazer in the new field of cloud-based contact centers. What they provide is infrastructure very much like cloud computing, except specialized for contact center operations. The core is a much more than a simple hosted PBX system. It performs that function, of course, to connect each agent telephone with a customer. That agent can be sitting at the desk they have now or pick up and move to another area, even be located at home where they join the operation on a part-time or full time basis. This alone gives you a flexibility to employ excellent prospects who can’t or won’t commute to your facility every day.

You probably realize that your current PBX system has a certain capacity. You have so many phones and so many phone lines. As soon as you get one too many callers, the system starts giving busy signals to the overflow. That means lost sales or irritated customers who are going to think twice about doing business with you again. The cloud system has an enormous capacity that you can tap on short notice. Do you have seasonal peaks in your business? No need to have extra capacity idling during the slow periods just so you can handle the rush. The cloud can scale up and down to meet your varying needs throughout the year.

Oh, but is the cloud as reliable as an in-house system? Probably more so. inContact offers a service level agreement of 99.99% availability through dual redundant data centers located in Dallas and Los Angeles. There are six layers of cloud security to ensure that your data stays private. Unlike other cloud service providers, inContact was a telecom carrier before they were a cloud company. That means they can also provide the highly reliable bandwidth you need to connect your agents to the system, with only one provider to deal with.

How much can you save? It varies, of course, but a recent study shows that total cost of ownership can be 30% less for a few as 50 seats and sliced by over 50% for a 500 seat contact center. Is that intriguing enough to get you interested in learning more and getting complete details on prices, cost savings and features? You may be shocked by what you are missing out on.

Backup and Recovery For All Businesses

Let’s face it, businesses are vulnerable. Not just to the vagaries of the economy or whims of the environment. Your greatest vulnerability may be sitting on your desk or mounted in the racks of your data center. Without backup and recovery, you are one violation of Murphy’s Law away from major headaches.

What is most at risk? Your data. At one time, all business records were on paper and the big risk was fire. Today, most business records are electronic and the big risk is corruption or erasure. One thing that can go wrong is that somebody accidentally changes or deletes something important and there is no copy. Another is that an entire day’s, week’s or longer data set is wiped out by a disk crash. Once again, no copies means you have to start all over to recreate what was lost.

Don’t depend on backup CD ROMs or DVDs written whenever somebody remembers to create them or has some free time. You expect the rest of your business processes to be more robust. Give serious consideration to doing the same for your valuable electronic data files.

Acronis specializes in backup and recovery for all size businesses from home offices right on up to major corporations. They offer backup and recovery across the network and for standalone Windows servers, Linux servers, workstations, and online backup. Other solutions include server disk management, server system deployment, recovery for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Exchange SBS, recovery for MS SQL Server and workstation system deployment.

Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 is based on a unified platform consisting of a suite of modules that work together to support disaster recovery, data protection and migration. Together they perform single-pass backup and de-duplication for all your files, folders, applications and operating systems. This includes coverage of disks, files, virtual machines, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server. Backups can be targeted to tape, disk storage or the cloud.

The latest migration, of course, is to the cloud. Acronis Backup and Recovery Online gives you secure and cost effective offsite data protection. Why offsite? While local storage protects you against disk failure or accidental file deletion, it won’t help if a flood or tornado comes roaring through town. Your precious backup tapes and disks can easily be smashed all over the countryside along with your other computing assets. That’s why you should consider offsite storage.

In fact, the most efficient and robust solution can easily be a combination of onsite and offsite backup. Why? While offsite backup gives you protection against complete loss of your local facilities, you are dependent on a bandwidth link to get to your data. Most companies have far more LAN bandwidth than they do WAN bandwidth or Internet connection bandwidth. In-house bandwidth is relatively cheap and 100 Mbps to 1000 Mbps can be had for commodity prices. Once you leave the building and depend on a third party provider to connect you across town or across the country, the cost of bandwidth gets pricey fast.

What this means in practical terms is that you can get your files back a lot faster over your own network than you can bringing them back on the cloud. For a single small file, this is no big deal. But if you lose a Terabyte disk, it can be awhile before you have it restored through your telecom link.

Acronis addresses this security vs accessibility conundrum by offering an integrated solution that combines their Backup & Recovery 11 software with their online cloud product. Most backup solutions do one or the other, not both. This integration means that your administration efforts are made easy, while you enjoy the benefits of convenience and protection.

Are you a bit squeamish about what could happen to your business if technical or other disaster strikes unexpectedly? Sleep better knowing your data is protected. Check out Acronis Backup and Recovery Solutions now.

Cloud Based Services With Free Trial Offers

Many businesses are looking to the clouds as an opportunity to save capital investment and ongoing operating and maintenance costs. This is a hot field, with vendors scrambling to get in and establish themselves in the space. But how do you know what services are right for your needs?

It’s especially important for small businesses with limited resources to be sure they are getting the most for their IT and telephone dollars. One way to be sure is to try before you buy. With that in mind, we’ve complied a selection of cloud based services that offer a free trial period before you make a commitment.

Atlantic.Net offers a free trial of cloud hosting as an alternative to virtual private servers. Their platform is designed to let you build, test and deploy Windows or Linux servers in the cloud in a matter of seconds. You can run whatever software you need and pay by the hour for only the resources that you use. Atlantic.Net is committed to 100% uptime on their SAS 70 certified hosting solution.

BrowserMob offers a free trial of website load testing in the cloud. It’s important to know what your ecommerce or other web properties can handle before you miss an important sales opportunity because your site crashed from too much traffic. Run concurrent tests with real browsers, not simply HTTP requests. This service scales up to 5,000 concurrent browsers and 500,000 users with over 6,000 Mbps maximum data throughput to to handle the largest sites. Responsive expert testing advice helps you get results quickly.

Do spend a lot of time and money sending documents out for signature? RightSignature offers a 5 document free trial of their cloud-based document signature service. Rather than faxing or overnight mailing paper documents and waiting for them to be signed and returned, signers go online and create legally valid electronic signatures. You simply create your documents using standard office tools and then upload them to RightSignature. Then send out an email message with a link to your online document. The system creates a document signature certificate with signer information, audit long and unique ID number. Archiving is online, too, so you never have to hunt for a document again.

The rest of your paper documents also belong in the cloud. Shoeboxed offers a free trial of their document scanning and storage service in the cloud. This is perfect for anyone in business who deals with expense report receipts, business cards and other day to day documents that pile up on the desk. You can scan and file it yourself or Shoeboxed will do it for a very reasonable price. You just drop your papers in a secure mailer and soon they’ll show up on a secure online database. More than mere scanning, the actual information on the page is loaded into the database where you can export it to Excel, Salesforce, Outlook or other program of your choice.

Customer service is important for any company. Assistly offer a free trial of their customer service cloud solution. You get a month to see if it isn’t far better than your current methods of finding and responding to customer queries. This system includes social networks like Facebook and Twitter, as well as traditional email and toll free number contacts. As an integrated solution, everything you need is right there at the operator’s station in one easy to use tool.

Other services, from online meetings to toll free telephone, also offer free trial periods. Watch for free trial opportunities any time you shop online for business services. These are a great way to become confident that you are getting the right service at the right price.

Telecom Providers Build Their Own Clouds

Just as cloud companies are beginning to mature as businesses, Internet service providers and other carriers have decided to build out their own cloud offerings. Now, how does a harried IT manager or small business owner sort through all the various opportunities?

It’s important to remember that we are in the early days of the cloud. Like all new technologies, this one has a maturity or learning curve. We are on the early part of the upward slope. What that means is a lot of activity from a lot of players. You can expect new companies with new services to be popping up all the time. It also makes sense that current players in the computer and networking space will want to corral as much of this business for themselves as possible. If not, they may be justifiably concerned that they could be relegated to sidelines.

Windstream, a major competitive carrier for T1 lines, MPLS networks, dedicated Ethernet Internet and enterprise VoIP, saw the handwriting on the wall when they acquired Hosted Solutions last year. Adding the assets of Hosted Solutions to Windstream’s existing data centers, has given them the critical mass to get into cloud services for existing customers. Such services include such things as cloud storage, Infrastructure as a Service and private, public, and hybrid clouds. Other carriers, such as Level 3 Communications, also have cloud services available.

Most carriers have large data centers for their own use. They often leverage these assets by offering colocation services within their secure and highly reliable facilities. Colocation is something of a forerunner of the cloud. The provider offers racks and cages where you can move your servers and network appliances. They provide the electricity with backup, environmental control and security. Another big draw of colocation is the proximity to large amounts of bandwidth. Many companies either can’t get or can’t afford the cost of constructing fiber optic connections to their own facilities. At a colocation center, the carrier is right down the hall and a mere cross-connect away. It’s the best deal on bandwidth you can get.

More recently, colocation centers have begun to offer contracted technical support and even leased servers for those who don’t want to buy their own. In essence, the colo becomes your data center and you don’t need the capital expense, operational expense or staffing to run your own. That being the case, what’s different about cloud services?

The primary difference between colocation and the cloud likes in both outsourcing and virtualization. The cloud infrastructure consists of massive computing power and storage, all virtualized so that it can be sliced and diced as users require. While in the cloud, you are unaware that you are not the only one using the facilities. The same bank of servers that run your applications can be running dozens or hundreds of others simultaneously. The magic of virtualization creates the illusion that you have one or more physical servers all to yourself.

A good cloud is much more than that. Not only do you rent rather than buy, but you rent by the minute or hour times the number of servers you are using. You can add or subtract virtual servers at will and only pay for the ones you are reserving. The same is true for storage. You don’t worry about buying a new disk when you fill up the one you have. You simply increase or decrease storage as needed and pay by the byte.

The ability to increase and decrease resources almost instantly is a feature unique to the cloud. This scalability is highly desirable for companies with varying loads or ones that are rapidly growing. There is no need to be constantly buying and upgrading equipment when you can simply log into your cloud account and add resources at will.

What carriers bring to the table is one stop shopping. They already provide last mile access, multi-site connectivity, and converged voice, video and data networks. By adding cloud services, you have one bill to pay and a single point of contact for resolving issues such as latency or availability. Independent cloud service providers will need to be on their toes to stay ahead of the carriers, by offering more advanced services and lower pricing to stay in the game long term.

Are you ready for the cloud? The range of services and competitive pricing makes cloud computing and storage, colocation and managed services more cost effective than they’ve ever been. Inquire about availability and pricing for the networking and computing services you need for your particular applications.

Stress Testing For Your Website

You’ve built your website and bought hosting. Now you’ve launched a massive marketing campaign designed to recover all that time and expense through online sales. Everything is going smoothly until, horror of horror, the entire ecommerce enterprise comes crashing down. Worse, yet, it was during huge surge of visitor activity. What rotten luck.

Luck? I don’t think so. You could have known this was going to happen. How? By stress testing your website in advance of the traffic onslaught. Many companies don’t and find the weak spots in their infrastructure the hard way. The most unfortunate get brought down during the holiday rush and don’t recover in time to take advantage of the bubble in shopper traffic.

Don’t let this happen to you. Know where you stand before you find out the hard way. Load testing will tell you in short order how much capacity you really have so you can be sure to handle the traffic that will come your way or beef up the system while you have time.

BrowserMob load testing has the resources to give your web properties a run for their money, so that they can really run for the money when the opportunity permits. This is a cloud based service that make serious load testing affordable for companies large and small. In fact, the best deal of all is a free trial offer. Give BrowserMob a chance to stress test your site and see how it stands up.

The BrowserMob cloud generates massive amounts of simulated traffic using virtual users, real browser users or a combination of both. The traffic comes from a large pool of IP addresses to simulate actual visitors coming in from various parts of the country or around the world.

Not quite sure how to perform this type of testing? No problem. BrowserMob has a world class support staff to provide you with expert testing advice. Some of the features you’ll be interested in are real browsers to mimic the actual user experience, True AJAX support, flash video streaming and a maximum concurrent browser pool of up to 5,000 browsers. The maximum data throughput is over 6,000 Mbps. That’s the type of traffic that could cost or make you a fortune depending on whether your site can support it.

Can load testing tell you things about your website that you’ll be really glad to know? There’s one way to find out. Take a free cloud-based load test and see how it works. Then upgrade as needed to get the basic and premium testing you need to ensure the performance of your web properties.

Why Demand a SAS 70 Type II Data Center?

If you are considering a move to the cloud or colocation center, you want to be sure that you are dealing with a high quality operation that has the controls in place to ensure the privacy and security of your data. If you are in certain industries, such as health care and financial services, you may well be required to use this type of facility.

SAS 70 is about a very structured audit into the operations of a company that handles customers’ data. It’s done to a standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) called Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70, Service Organizations. This isn’t something you run yourself. You hire an independent accounting and auditing firm that performs the audit and issues a written report.

Actually there are two audits and reports. Type I is used to assess the suitability of controls that the organization has put into practice to achieve the security objectives. Type II includes that information, but is also a review of how effective the controls have operated during the time period being reviewed. That’s why Type II is so desirable. It shows that management has not only created a system but is actually performing to the procedures it has put in place.

What sort of things are audited? Important areas for the auditor include management and organization policies and procedures, physical security of the data center, logical security to ensure only authorized personnel have access to customer data, network security and management, application security and change control, system maintenance controls, incident reporting and resolution, change management, transaction processing, use of subcontractors and business continuity.

You can think of SAS 70 as something akin to the International Standards Organization ISO-9000 quality management standards and auditing for manufacturing organizations. They’re not the same thing, but both have the goal of providing assurance that you are dealing with a company that has effective processes and procedures in place and follows them. The principle is that sloppy seat-of-the-pants operations tend to deliver results that are all over the map. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don’t. You are much better off with a provider that can produce the same results over and over reliably.

What you want in a data center or cloud service provider is an operation that is secure and reliable above all. You wouldn’t prop open the back door to your in-house data center and let anyone who wanted to wander around unsupervised. Likewise, you want the peace of mind that the colocation facility that houses your servers has them secured in locked racks or cages and that nobody who doesn’t belong there can get into the data center at all.

The same is true of the networks that transport packets in and out of your servers. Those connections and the data that traverses them need to be under strict control so that your systems and data cannot be accessed by anyone who doesn’t have your express approval. One advantage of moving to a colocation center is that you are literally within walking distance of your carrier and perhaps your cloud service provider. With all the connections in-house, there is less likelihood of service disruptions or outsiders being able to tap into your data stream.

Service reliability is important as well. Having the servers and appliances locked down is great, but they also have to be on-line 24/7 to fulfill their mission. That’s where backup electrical power, cooling and network connections help keep your applications running non-stop is so valuable. The availability of trained technicians nearby is a way to ensure that if something does go wrong, it gets immediate attention.

Are you interested in moving to a high quality colocation facility or cloud service provider? Many now offer SAS70 Type II certification, so be sure to ask for that assurance when evaluating vendors. Get pricing and location for colocation and cloud services using SAS70 Type II Data Centers.

Low Latency Fiber Routes To Europe and Asia

Many US companies have offices in the UK and Europe. Multinational companies have their operations located worldwide. So, how do you reliably interconnect all of your international business locations including connections to the cloud?

More and more, the answer is low latency fiber routes. Low latency is a term you hardly ever use to hear. It became part of the user vernacular with the switch from circuit switched phone service to VoIP. Before that, latency was a derogatory word used to describe the big delay experienced when communicating through geosynchronous satellite links. Now all the major carriers are touting their new low latency fiber routes to Europe or Asia.

So why the big change? Aren’t fiber routes inherently low latency?

Indeed, most fiber optic connections have latencies in the tens of milliseconds or less. That’s enough to ignore for most purposes. Notable exceptions are high speed financial trading, data replication and some cloud services.

Don’t confuse bandwidth and latency. Bandwidth, often referred to a line speed, is how fast you are sending out ones and zeros. This may be limited to the capability of the terminal equipment at either end or, more often, the capacity of the line. You can connect Gigabit Ethernet routers to each end of a T1 line but your packets will transfer no faster than 1.5 Mbps. That’s the T1 line speed.

Latency is a different animal. It describes the time it takes for those ones and zeros to get from one end of the line to the other. Often latency is quoted as the time in milliseconds for a round trip from source to destination and back to source.

Here’s how latency rears its ugly head. Say you are trying to carry on a conversation with someone using VoIP on a connection that has several hundred milliseconds of latency. That sounds like a lot, but it’s not uncommon on the Internet. The two way conversation quickly becomes like using a walkie-talkie. You talk one at a time and then pause for second before you speak when the other person is done. If not, you find yourself talking at the same time, but stepping on each other’s conversations.

More to the point of fiber optic latency, say you and someone else are trading stocks using automated programs. If your algorithms both decide there is a buy opportunity at the exact same moment, they’ll each place a buy order of a certain size based on the price action they are detecting. What happens if your order reaches the exchange 10 or 15 milliseconds after your competitor? It’s entirely possible that they’ll get a better price because the market moved between the trades.

This is what is getting “quant” traders exercised over latency and why there is a substantial market for the lowest latency connections possible. Carriers can reduce the latency of their fiber optic routes by taking the shortest path possible between two locations and minimizing the amount of equipment in that path. Every switch, router and multiplexer takes a small amount of time to do its job. Add them all up and you’ve increased latency.

Ultimately, the speed of light through the glass fiber is the limiting factor. That’s why shorter paths are lower latency. For the ultimate in latency reduction, you want to colocate in the same facility that houses the exchange computers or very near by. In high speed trading, even microseconds now count.

Latency was never that much of a problem when the bulk of traffic was one-way data file transfers. They get there when they get there and TCP/IP makes sure they arrive intact. It’s also no big deal for one-way audio and video streams or downloads. You just have a slight delay before the program starts. You probably won’t notice latency because there is a much larger delay built-in to buffer for jitter caused by congestion and packets taking different paths through the network. Two-way voice (VoIP) and video (teleconferencing and telepresence) are definitely affected by latency, although not to the same extent as financial trading and other very latency sensitive processes.

Does your company need higher performance network links to be more effective? You’ll do well to review the cost/benefit tradeoffs of low latency fiber optic networks, MPLS networks and other options available for your business locations.



Note: World map image courtesy of NOAA on Wikimedia Commons.

Cheaper Connections To The Cloud

Companies often smack their lips as they compare the cost of cloud services to the capital investment and operating expenses of running their own data centers. Then they take another look and see a big gotcha. Oops! What is it going to cost for all this cloud connectivity?

What you pay for bandwidth now depends a lot on your mix of LAN, MAN and WAN traffic. Companies with data centers in the same building as most of their employees can expect that the lion’s share of their business applications traffic stays on the LAN. Certainly you need a dedicated broadband Internet connection to stay connected with the outside world. But if all you are doing is sending email and accessing Web sites for information, a modest line speed can support a lot of users.

E-commerce is another matter. If most of your traffic is from customers and other users via the Internet, you need a high bandwidth connection for your public facing servers. Your WAN traffic may even be larger than your LAN traffic.

Offsite, but in-town, data centers also require high bandwidth connections even if they are used primarily for disaster backup and recovery or data mirroring. In this case, the majority of your bandwidth may be over the MAN rather than the LAN or the WAN.

Now, here’s how things change when you move to the cloud. You public servers are now rented, not owned, and your bandwidth costs are part of the service fee. You may not need a MAN connection at all if you are buying storage in the cloud. What you will need is a much bigger pipe between your office building or buildings and your cloud service provider.

Companies that kept everything in-house can get some sticker shock when they find out that the cloud savings is offset by the increased cost of higher bandwidth private line services between their location and the cloud. Other companies that now have most of their bandwidth chewed up by Internet accesses may breath a big sigh of relief that the cloud provider is also supplying bandwidth to the Internet. It is well worth your while to build a quick chart that compares LAN, MAN and WAN bandwidth needs between your current setup and what you’ll have when you go to the cloud.

Regardless of how the mix works out, you’ll want to get the most bandwidth you can for your IT dollar. Fortunately, you have much more in the way of options now than even just a few years ago. One reason is heavy competition for higher bandwidth circuits. The other is new technology that adds to the option list.

The newest technology that you may not have investigated yet is EoC or Ethernet over Copper. EoC is a direct competitor for traditional T1 lines and higher bandwidth T1 lines. In some cases it can even be a substitute for fiber optic services.

Ethernet over Copper uses multiple twisted pair copper telco wiring, just like T1. It’s a more efficient modulation scheme, however, and offers higher bandwidths than are generally practical by bonding together T1 lines. Unlike T1, EoC is distance sensitive and requires you to be within 2 or 3 miles of the nearest telco office. For companies located in cities and their suburbs this generally works out fine. Out in the country, you won’t find much service.

Popular Ethernet over Copper bandwidth options include 2, 3, 5, 10 and 20 Mbps. Service equal to 45 Mbps DS3 is available in many metro locations. Some companies even offer 100 Mbps bandwidth using copper instead of fiber.

Even more exciting is the pricing for EoC services. You can often get 2 or 3 Mbps Ethernet service for the price of a T1 line. It’s not unheard of to pay half or less for the higher bandwidth Ethernet services than what you are used to paying for traditional telecom line services.

Are you contemplating a move to the cloud and need to know your bandwidth costs or just want to save money on the line services you have now? You may be pleasantly surprised by what you find when you check pricing and availability of EoC and other bandwidth services for your particular business locations.

The Rush To Cloud Service Data Centers

There’s a major migration afoot. It’s a move, almost a stampede, from in-house server rooms to public data centers worldwide. Let’s take a look at what this trend is all about and where it may be leading.

The original reason for companies to consider data center colocation was cost savings. The tradeoff is fairly simple. Instead of your organization building and operating its own data center, you ship your servers, switches, routers and network appliances off to a colo facility. That facility offers cost savings through economy of scale. Instead of each business having to come up with environmentally controlled real estate, fire suppression, backup generator power and high bandwidth connectivity, the larger colocation company provides these facilities for hundreds or thousands of customers.

A colo or “carrier hotel”, as they were originally called when the main customers were competitive local exchange carriers, can provide the 24/7 technical staffing that you may not be able to afford. They’ve expanded their suite of services to rent not just rack and cage space, but servers themselves. You no longer have to buy and ship your own equipment. You can rent what you need and have it all set up for you. Even ongoing maintenance can be outsourced to the colo so that your only responsible for the applications you are running.

There is a blending of missions between colocation data centers and hosting companies. The colocation centers have become hosts with the addition of dedicated servers and even virtual servers.

The latest trend in IT is cloud computing and this is where colocation data centers are headed. One good example is PAETEC, a competitive telecom carrier with a national service footprint. PAETEC is known for it’s voice and data services that include T1 lines, DS3, SIP trunking, MPLS networks, OCx fiber optic bandwidth, and Ethernet over copper and fiber connections. Now PAETEC is on a major building spree to nearly triple its 7 data centers spread across the country.

What’s prompting this expansion? It’s all about the cloud. Corporate America has discovered cloud services as a way to control costs, increase flexibility and avoid sometimes unavailable capital investments in infrastructure. The idea of the cloud is very much like the concept of the colocation center with some capability expansions. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) allows you to rent all the servers and their related facilities that you need. The difference is that the architecture of the cloud is about making it easy to add and subtract resources rapidly. You can do that when servers are virtual and there are massive amounts of networked disk storage to draw from.

PAETEC is offering cloud-based products in their data centers that include dedicated servers, virtual servers, managed storage on demand and more. Hosted Exchange gives companies a Microsoft Exchange E-Mail server with PAETEC technicians and engineers available for support.

Is it time for your company to consider a move to the cloud or relocation to a colocation center to reduce costs and gain access to more resources as needed? If so, get pricing and availability of Cloud and Colocation Data Center Services near your location.



Note: Photo of clouds and building courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

MegaPath Merges Integrated and Hosted Voice

Telephone switching has migrated over the decades from the local telephone company to the enterprise and now out to the cloud. MegaPath is building a bridge from in-house phone systems to cloud telephony by adding hosted services to their Integrated Voice services. This could be the cost effective transition you’ve been looking for.

If all you are doing is buying a few analog business lines from your local phone company and running them through a small business phone system you got at one of the big box office stores, you’ve pretty much got what you are going to get. Small companies have a way of growing to become medium size companies, however, and a two or four line system with a half dozen desk sets is quickly outgrown.

This is where most businesses call in a local phone system dealer who installs and maintains a particular brand of business phone system. With an in-house PBX (Private Branch Exchange), you’ll be adding more outside lines but now you have the opportunity to shop around. You can get your analog lines from a competitive provider or move up to digital trunk lines to save money once you get more than 6 to 12 lines.

MegaPath, a major competitive carrier with a nationwide service footprint, has a service called Integrated Voice specifically tailored to SMBs with their own PBX systems. They provide the outside lines that connect your PBX system to the world. The interface can be traditional analog lines for smaller systems, T1-CAS or ISDN-PRI digital trunks for medium and larger systems, or SIP Trunking for the newer IP PBX systems that support enterprise VoIP.

The Integrated feature of Integrated Voice is that you get both telephone and broadband service over the same dynamic DSL, T1 or Ethernet connection. This is a bit different from simply adding a third party VoIP service to your broadband service. With Integrated Voice, the combined data/voice is carefully managed to ensure that voice packets have priority over data packets so that using your computers won’t cause the telephone calls to break up. Any time a phone wants to make or receive a call, the bandwidth for this is reserved from the Integrated pool. Bandwidth not used for phone calls is automatically assigned for broadband Internet access.

Integrated Voice services are popular with small to medium size businesses because nearly every business needs both telephone lines and broadband Internet access. You can pay for these separately or have a more efficient and cost effective solution that combines the two.

Hosted Voice is a different animal. With hosted services, you no longer have a PBX system on your premises. Instead, you use a much larger PBX that is located at your service provider. It’s as if the service provider has become the new phone company. All you have in-house are telephones. These can be traditional phones that connect to an adaptor called a voice gateway or SIP Phones that are designed to connect directly to your network.

Hosted Voice services, also known as hosted PBX, are popular with companies that haven’t invested in their own PBX system or want to avoid the capital outlay for a needed upgrade and the ongoing maintenance headaches. All of those issues move to the service provider. As a user, you don’t perceive that the phone system is in the cloud rather than in the basement of your building. You may also enjoy advanced features such as remote worker, find me/follow me, simultaneous ring, auto attendants and hunt groups that weren’t available on your old PBX system.

MegaPath has been offering both the Integrated Voice and Hosted Voice services. What they’re doing now is giving businesses the chance to add Hosted Voice features to their Integrated Voice service as an overlay to their lines or trunks. This offers the opportunity for companies to gain more features almost instantly without the headache and expense of completely redoing their phone system right away. It’s something of a hybrid cloud approach where some of the equipment is on-site and some is in the cloud at the service provider’s facility.

Are you interested in upgrading your current business phone system with more advanced features or getting a better price on phone lines and trunks? If so, check out Integrated and Hosted Voice Services for business locations to find the mix that works best for you.

Gigabit Ethernet vs SONET

With the expansion of video content and moves to cloud services, business bandwidth now easily pushes the Gigabit per second level. This certainly means a move from copper to fiber optic services. But did you know that there are two types of fiber optic bandwidth to choose from? They are SONET and Gigabit Ethernet.

SONET is the original fiber protocol developed by the telephone companies to transport large numbers of simultaneous telephone calls between switching centers and internationally. SONET stands for Synchronous Optical NETwork. There is an international version of this protocol called SDH for Synchronous Digital Hierarchy. Together they are often referred to a SONET/SDH.

SONET’s origins go back to the initial development of digitized telephone conversations and the transmission of these a groups using trunks known as T1 lines. The larger T3 lines can carry the equivalent of 28 T1 lines or a data bandwidth of 45 Mbps. There are no faster copper telco standards. The next step up is OC-3 at 155 Mbps. That’s enough to transport 3 DS3 circuits and, indeed, the protocol is designed to easily multiplex and demultiplex lower level services. When you order a DS3 today, it will be transported most if not all of the way multiplexed into a OC service. A device called an ADM or Add-Drop Multiplexer gets the service on and off the optical network.

You’ve probably guessed that OC stands for Optical Carrier. There are a number of optical carrier levels that include OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-24 at 1.24 Gbps, OC-48 at 2.49 Gbps, OC-192 at 9.95 Gbps and OC-768 at 39.8 Gbps. When you hear about 10 Gbps SONET, it is an OC-192 service. The 40 Gbps that many carriers use for long haul transmission is OC-768.

What about intermediate rates? Not all levels between 1 and 768 are defined. Others, such as OC-9, OC-18, OC-36 and OC-96 are standardized but not generally offered in service.

SONET/SDH is set up in ring arrangements with two separate fiber strands for each ring. They are redundant circuits, so if one fails the other can pick up the load within 50 mSec.

Ethernet is a completely different protocol developed by the computer industry rather than the telephone companies. It is based on packets rather than telephone channels. Most LAN connected devices have a NIC or Network Interface Card that supports 10/100/1000 Ethernet. That means the device can run at 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps or 1,000 Mbps (1 Gbps). Corporate LANs may now run at 1 Gbps with some parts of the network using 10 Gbps or 10 GigE.

The equivalent of Ethernet in the LAN for local networks is Ethernet WAN or Wide Area Network. Switched Ethernet used for WAN applications is also called Carrier Ethernet. If the service is local to a particular city or metro area, it is often called Metro Ethernet or Metropolitan Ethernet and the network is referred to as a MAN or Metro Area Network.

Like telco services, Ethernet may be delivered over copper or fiber. Twisted pair copper telephone line can be used up to 100 Mbps. That speed is also available over coaxial copper cable through Cable systems. Beyond that, fiber optic connections can deliver 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps for business applications.

Ethernet is designed to be far more scalable than SONET. Instead of ordering a particular service level, such as OC-24, you order an Ethernet port capable of handling a maximum speed, say 1 Gbps. With the port in place, you can pay for Gigabit Ethernet if you need that much, or you can order 250 Mbps or 500 Mbps Ethernet and upgrade quickly and easily when the need arises.

Which fiber optic service should you order? In general, Ethernet is less expensive per Mbps than SONET. Sometimes the price savings can be dramatic. The one sticking point is that you need to have the service installed in your building. You may have one or the other services now or nothing at all. The cost of construction to bring in the right fiber from the right carrier can outweigh the monthly lease costs. You should know, though, that Ethernet can often be carried on SONET and that competitive carriers are hungry to get new buildings on their networks. These factors can affect the availability and pricing of fiber optic services to your building.

Fiber optic build-outs are progressing rapidly and the demand for high speed bandwidth increases. Even if you went out for bids a year ago, the situation may have changed for the better since then. The best thing to do is get new prices and availability for fiber optic bandwidth services for your particular business location.



Note: Photo of data center servers courtesy of WikimediaCommons