Are you at Risk Using The Public Internet
Over the past 15 years or more, businesses have experienced the trend of driving operational computing and communications down. The trend has been do more with less $. The recent drop in Computer hardware pricing over the past 5 years has fueled this reduction even further. Now every business can have an enterprise quality computing environment and telecommunications solution that is better than what most Fortune 100 companies ran their business on 10 years ago for a fraction of the investment. In addition to this with the proliferation of high speed internet at extremely low monthly fees the attraction of utilizing the internet to run business application over the internet has been huge. This has further fueled the cost savings for organizations around the globe
Today the internet is relied on for every type of business transaction that you can think of through to credit processing between businesses and banking institutions. Yes the internet is an infrastructure that hold the veritable panacea of applications for one low price per month. I can run Virtual Private Network (VPNs) over the internet. I can run my corporate web site on the internet or access my CRM (Customer Relations Management) application. Backup is possible over the net for my mission critical sensitive data to offsite vaults to protect my business. My email communications, fax communications, voice communications and video communications are all running over the public internet. Post and courier services no longer carry messages and data to remote locations when we can simply transfer gigabytes of data across 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 running your business or mission critical applications is the fact that all internet connections are created equally. One can have the problem of old cabling and underground cable for the last mile to your operation. In this area all providers are not created equally or over the same time frame. It is wise to diversify your last mile connections to give your much more reliability and protection.
fYou are at risk for packet loss or diminished voice communications if you are running all your traffic over the same internet or voice over internet protocol connection. Web browsing,email,file transfer and backup applications are built to operate if the connection is mostly stable. The same cannot be said for voice which requires no packet loss or dropped connections. It is wise to consider alternatives such as point-to-point connections to give you maximum flexibility and quality of service.
All connections are not created equal, even from the same carrier or supplier. You must reinvest the savings you get in one area with technology to give you better options for access and security