Cloud technologies have transformed the playing field for small and midsize businesses, largely because of their flexibility. Organizations have the ability to quickly and painlessly ramp up their services when they need something more.
“Using their Internet connection, they can harness the power — and reap the rewards — of applications traditionally available only to large enterprises with big IT budgets,” says Kevin Conmy, regional vice president, Freedom Region at Comcast Business. “Cloud-based services, from servers to storage, provide access to high-performance infrastructure without high-priced investments. Streaming video can be used to bring conferences and training to any employee, anywhere. Mobile devices increase productivity beyond company walls, with businesses seeing increased efficiency and a growing bottom line.
“But what may not be immediately visible is the impact these tools are having on company networks,” he says.
Smart Business spoke with Conmy about sufficiently planning for your company’s bandwidth needs for today and tomorrow.
How are Internet connections and networks affecting business operations?
As organizations move to the cloud and embrace applications like high-definition video and Web-based tools, their Internet connection becomes more important. Suddenly, more data needs to move — and move quickly — over your connection. If your network doesn’t have sufficient bandwidth or speed, you could experience slower response times, or risk losing connectivity completely.
As a result, many tools intended to allow businesses to analyze data, make decisions, and interact with employees and customers with lightning speed are at risk of not operating at peak efficiency. There may be a delay between a query to a cloud-based data center and a response, or video streams may freeze as they struggle over a lagging connection. Remote workers also might have difficulty accessing applications or email because too many people are accessing the company network simultaneously.
Which businesses face bandwidth problems?
This need for speed is more the rule than the exception. In a 2012 Comcast Business poll, 84 percent of small and midsized business respondents experienced increasing bandwidth needs because of their use of the cloud, Wi-Fi and mobile devices.
This trend is expected to increase, too, as companies continue to aggregate and unlock value from customer data, such as order histories, buying preferences and online shopping patterns. More than half of respondents in a different Comcast Business survey expect the quantity of collected data to grow at least 50 percent within two years.
How can organizations deal with the challenge of increasing bandwidth?
Clearly, a bandwidth upgrade is, or soon will be, in order for many. In the old days, companies often relied on T1 lines from traditional phone providers. So, boosting speeds involved buying and tying together more lines, a pricey and complex endeavor.
Today, things are easier, but only if you ask the right questions before an upgrade:
- Does the network have the reach we need? If you rely on transferring data between offices, make sure your provider has a wide network, and double-check to ensure all locations are within that footprint. Just because one office may appear to be in the middle of a coverage map doesn’t guarantee your satellite location 20 miles away will have that same good fortune.
- How quickly, and in what increments, can we change our bandwidth? Having the ability to scale up or down can help companies buy only what they need and cut long run costs. Select a provider that can do this via a simple phone call to save you hours of aggravation and help enhance business productivity.
- What happens if the network goes down? The majority of telecom providers operate over another provider’s fiber lines. So, although you may be under contract with a smaller company boasting a less expensive monthly bill, you’re likely using the same line as one of the larger companies. What does this mean? In an outage, your main contact may not be able to immediately resolve the issue.
By asking now, you can help ensure your company knows what it needs for the future so you can begin planning accordingly. ●
Kevin Conmy is regional vice president of the Freedom Region at Comcast Business. Reach him at (215) 642-6457 or [email protected].
Insights Telecommunications is brought to you by Comcast Business
