Is your current Internet Connection Cloud ready?

Things to consider when choosing business Internet connections

As the business world makes a shift to the cloud for business applications and voice way too often the most important piece to this pie is forgotten, the business Internet connections. Way too regularly, when I meet with business owners, they make the mistake of treating the Internet connection for their business as a commodity. Failing to consider as they migrate to the cloud the following:

1. The type of business Internet connections (dedicated or shared broadband) and how it will affect their cloud applications. Slow connections can cause poor performance for employees and can lead to their frustration.
2. When the business Internet connections go down and how this impact their businesses. How much productivity does a business lose when employees can’t access the Internet?  How much business do you lose?

The Types of Internet connections

They are usually 2 different flavors of business internet connections available: Dedicated Internet (DIA) and Broadband Internet access. The 2 types access give businesses what they need an Internet connection, but are significantly different in performance, uptime and price.

Dedicated Internet

This is exactly what it is advertised as Dedicated to your business and only your business. It is usually deployed via Fiber or copper with guaranteed speeds (downstream and upstream) and normally symmetrical. They come with service level agreements (SLAs) that guaranteed quality of service (QOS), uptime and mean time to repair. Unlike broadband the business is the only one utilizing the connection, there is a 1 to 1 ratio.

Broadband Internet

Don’t always be fooled by the name.  This type of connection most commonly used by the SMB market. It includes the cable connection from your local cable company along with DSL and now shared Fiber connection from your Local phone company. Broadband is a shared connection where it is shared among other customers of the provider, allowing it to be more cost effective than DIA. These types of connections are very attractive to small businesses because of the price and they often sound like they provide more bandwidth than DIA. But like the airline industry, these connections are overbooked with ratios of 1 to 6+. The actual bandwidth this connection provides depends on these ratios and who you share your bandwidth with. So sometimes you may see full bandwidth and other times you will not. That is why sometimes customer see a degradation in quality in the afternoon after school is let out with kids start streaming music, video games and Netflix.  Also, if your business is in area where your providers bandwidth is being heavily used by other businesses you will also see quality of service drop.  All of this can directly affect how your business runs, especially if you are using the cloud for applications and voice.

Will your Internet connection be there for you?

The other aspect that is often forgotten is will your connection be available when your users need it? Let’s face it the truth no carrier can guarantee 100% uptime. Every carrier has issues; every type of connection will have issues as well, just some more than others. So as the dependency on the Internet to conduct business increases with applications like Salesforce and Office365 to name a few, the need to always be connected has become mission critical. As the Cloud has taken over how we conduct business so has the technology available for businesses to make sure they always have an Internet connection available. Depending on your business’ location and budget, true diversity can be implemented in a few ways.

1. A back up circuit is the most popularly used approach and with the cost of bandwidth coming down, it can    be  a cost-effective solution. The idea is when your primary connection goes down the back up connection takes over. But with this solution, the second connection lies dormant while you pay for it and your businesses primary connection may get over loaded.
2. Full redundancy can be achieved by utilizing 2 diverse active connections. This gives your business an always on connection. This more reliable solution, if set up with the right technology (SDWAN), can aggregate both circuits. This gives your business access to a much larger primary circuit, when both circuits are up and active. So, the business can utilize all their Internet bandwidth connections.
3. LTE and 4G are great back up connections. But because of over usage charges, it shouldn’t be used a primary connection.

Whichever bandwidth your business chooses and whether you have a failover in place comes down to your businesses need for business continuity and dependency on the Internet to conduct business. Selecting and managing the right Internet connections for your primary and failover connections can be a daunting task. Businesses have more choices than your local cable and telecom representatives have to offer.

Let Traverse Technologies show you what is available. Simply contact us today to learn more. As your trusted technology partner, we will guide you through the process of designing, implementing and managing all the pieces so you can focus on what you do best run your business