Suffolk Computer Consultants, Inc. Blog

Digital file storage has been a game-changer for many small and medium-sized businesses that heavily rely on file retention. Instead of storing paper records in a huge room dedicated to file storage, businesses are focusing on digitizing their records and storing them electronically in storage systems designed for use in the cloud.

It is no secret that the cloud has overwhelmingly improved much of business computing with its innovative features, yet that does not mean the use of cloud technology is free of concerns for a business to consider. In part due to the cloud’s flexibility with solutions, many companies have encountered serious problems that go so far as to put the entire business at risk. What follows are some concerns that businesses that plan to introduce the cloud to their workers will have to consider and prepare to deal with.

A Poem about Internet Bandwidth
There’s a hunger still unsatisfied that reaches far across the land,
Caused by devices in every hand.
Encumbered forever by desire and ambition,
Who can feed this Netflix addiction?
Or, to put it plainly;
Keeping up with increasing bandwidth demands is straining.

Will there ever be enough?
To give you a sense of the looming bandwidth problems that are just over the horizon, consider these statistics and trends:

• A single hour of HD video takes up about 3GB of data.
• According to a 2015 Sandvine report:
  
  • Netflix accounts for 37 percent of all North American downstream Internet traffic.
  • YouTube is in second place at 16 percent.
• According to Cisco, 50 billion IoT devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020.
• According to a 2016 Spiceworks survey, 62 percent of companies use network-enabled security cameras. These HD cameras are infamous for producingdata-intensive video streams.
• According to Sandvine, cloud-based file sharing services and online storage account for 40 percent of upstream North American traffic.
• All things considered, media streaming, mobile devices, and cloud computing shouldn’t be viewed as merely fads. In fact, every IT professional is well aware that online media will eat up more bandwidth. As a result, businesses of all types are relying more on cloud-based services.

While this may not be much of a concern for the average consumer wishing to stream Netflix at home, these trends pose challenges to company networks supporting dozens or hundreds of users and devices. If users in your workplace are left unchecked, your network may slow to a crawl in the middle of the workday when you need it the most. We don’t have to tell you how bandwidth and bottleneck issues of this magnitude can wreak havoc on productivity, causing major and expensive downtime.

How to Ensure There’s Enough Bandwidth for Everyone in Your Office
Aside from obvious solutions, like implementing bandwidth monitoring tools and upgrading your company’s Internet package and internal switches so they can handle the increased traffic, you can curtail this problem by implementing some hard and fast policies regarding Internet usage in the workplace.

Taking proactive measures like these should especially be applied in relation to how employees use their mobile devices (a trend known as BYOD). For help blocking problem websites and apps from hogging up too much bandwidth on your network, one key tool designed to assist with this is a content filtering solution. Suffolk Computer Consultants can provide you with such a tool.

For your consideration, here are some additional tips on how you can optimize your company’s bandwidth, brought to you by Suffolk Computer Consultants:

• Establish Quality of Service (QoS) policies for the services that are most important. By prioritizing business-critical applications like your VoIP phone system, line of business applications, and other everyday, always-on services, you can make sure they don’t get interrupted by an employee downloading large files or streaming hit shows like Westworld on their lunch break.
• Set up an alternate network to allow for visitors and other users to access the web and social media to segregate the traffic from your business’ network. This is especially important for businesses that offer guest Wi-Fi. Just make sure that the users ask for the security code. Otherwise, you’ll never know what’s lurking on your free Wi-Fi network.
• If your network bandwidth is being utilized excessively by particular sources, then putting data usage caps on users, services, or their devices can help you even out the distribution of your network resources.

For help managing your company’s network so that bandwidth is never in short supply, reach out to Suffolk Computer Consultants at (631) 905-9617.

The cloud is a dynamic tool that benefits businesses in a variety of ways. Although, it’s important to keep in mind that, as is the nature of any tool, users must know how to leverage its use in order to reap the promised benefits. Without such specialized knowledge, an organization adopting the cloud will essentially have a powerful tool in their possession that does little for them.       

What’s your plan if an employee loses a mobile device with company data on it? You’ll likely start by asking a lot of questions. When did they last use it? What locations did they visit? Of course, they don’t know--it could have been misplaced at the airport, forgotten in the cab, or left in the booth at a diner. Once you’ve determined that the phone is truly gone, what do you do next?

Businesses adopt cloud computing with the intention of cashing in on its many benefits, like doing more for less. Although, how does a business owner know for certain that their cloud investment is actually paying off? Here are five ways to find out.

Remember when the biggest concern society had about car byproducts was regarding CO2 emissions? While reducing emissions from vehicles will always be a priority for the environmentally-conscious, on the horizon there looms an even bigger challenge that car manufacturers are responsible for. Namely, what’s to be done with the vast amounts of data to be generated by autonomous cars?

Today’s business environment is more competitive than ever before, and one of the ways that organizations are attempting to overtake others in their industry is through the use of dynamic technology solutions. By effectively leveraging productivity tools, employees can collaborate in never before seen ways and exceed all expectations.

One of the biggest problems a business has with its IT infrastructure is the lack of funds a business has to commit to obtaining and maintaining the necessary computing infrastructure. Whether they’re trying to run resource-intensive application, or simply need more storage space than they can manage independently, the cloud can provide them with the means to do so.

The cloud is swiftly becoming the method by which most computing is done, especially as far as businesses are concerned. You may have been considering adding the cloud to your own IT strategy. However, in order to make your best decision, there are a few questions you need to ask

If you suddenly were to find yourself in a data-loss situation, you would want to have some sort of backup in place to protect your critical data. However, not all backup solutions are the same, and some will do a better job than others at keeping your data safe while remaining convenient to the needs of a business. As an example, let’s compare tape backup to a cloud-based backup and data recovery solution.

Cloud computing has helped many businesses over the past few years. The many benefits it provides have enabled a variety of businesses in many industries to improve their functionality. The retail sector is a prime example of one such industry. Here are a few benefits that the cloud has imparted to those in retail--benefits that your business could enjoy as well.

Businesses today rely on technology, and as a result, their means of getting the resources they need are shifting and advancing. Consequently, cloud-based offerings have become popular because of their capabilities in the workplace. One of these capabilities has become particularly popular due to its utility to businesses: file sharing.

Small businesses rely on technology each and every day to accomplish their business goals, which are largely influenced by the technology that is available to leverage. To continue this cycle, it helps to look ahead and anticipate what will be prioritized next in computing and IT innovation. It appears that today’s businesses are more focused on convenience.

There’s no denying the importance of data management for businesses, but companies that utilize cloud-based data storage and infrastructure access have to be extra aware. How can your business ensure that your data storage methods are working for you, and not against you? For this week’s tip, we’ll discuss some of the ways that businesses can best use their cloud-based data storage without compromising efficiency.

The cloud has taken over the business environment, and every business that takes advantage of it needs to consider several factors to ensure that they purchase the right one for their specific needs. Here are three common talking points for businesses to consider when investing in a cloud-based solution.

The cloud has transformed the way people work; and, as a result people rely on it for more than ever. Some businesses have all their computing resources in the cloud, while many others utilize it for software as a service, communication tools, and other major parts of their business’ IT. The more businesses start relying on cloud-hosted computing resources, the more these cloud resources are being wasted. Since they come at a premium price, businesses are beginning to discover that they are wasting money on their cloud.