Many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) first Internet connection is with an inexpensive asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) account, or a wireless technology such as iBurst, and for the first few months the benefits of 24 hours, always on, Internet access far outweighs the minimal cost of the connection. As time goes by though businesses find that their bandwidth usage steadily grows. Before long the bandwidth that they originally had, starts to run out during the month and this this starts to happen earlier and earlier each month.
Due to the negligible cost of ADSL, the business starts to increase the cap on their account, rather than face the prospects of lost productivity due to slow or non-existent Internet connection. In cases where the business is on a soft-capped ADSL account they may not even upgrade at all leading even higher bandwidth costs as the out-of-bundle rate is much higher than the in-bundle rate. Over time bandwidth bills can grow to be a significant cost!
After a year or more the bandwidth bill has slowly grown to a point where it is a significant monthly cost. Most business don't question this growth in the bandwidth bill because:
- it has happened incrementally over a relatively long period of time,
- it is assumed that Internet usage grows as the workplace adjusts more and more of its workflow and processes to make use of the Internet,
- it is assumed that since the business has grown so has the Internet usage,
- For some reason people associate the Internet with "free"
Proper IT management processes need to be put in place
Whilst many of these assumptions are true it is a mistake to not question the amount of Internet usage in an organisation. The fact is that SMEs don't know what their bandwidth is being used for because there is no management process in place to monitor utilisation. In some respect the business has become a victim of its own success in that its IT management practices and infrastructure has not grown with the organisation. Bandwidth costs are something that should be monitored monthly!
Most SMEs rely on the barely acceptable features that come with their ADSL modem for the management of their Internet connection. Unfortunately, whilst this is ok for home users, it is not for a businesses. The first thing business owners should do is to start recording and monitoring usage. The easiest way to do this is to put a cheap, inexpensive firewall in place.
Any decent firewall will provide you with
- detailed break down of bandwidth usage by protocol. internet jobs at home it it SMTP(mail), HTTP(Web) that is using all the bandwidth or is it something else like peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa or e-mule or maybe a zombie PC spamming the world on behalf of the Russian mafia?
- Allow you to restrict internet usage to the web and mail only,
- Allow you to prevent inappropriate and bandwidth hogging sites like YouTube and Facebook,
- Save bandwidth by acting as a web proxy, i.e caching pages from frequently used sites so they are fetched only once,
- Allow you to assign username and password to staff to enable you to track Internet abusers
Once you start managing the Internet connection rather than just treating it as a unknown you can start to mange the costs associated with it as well. Bear in mind that the costs may not only be increased bandwidth usage fees but also wasted time with employees spending more time responding to Facebook friends and arranging their social life than on work.
Mark Clarke has over 10 years experience consulting with companies and individuals on the best broadband option for their needs and budgets. Whether its ADSL,diginet,3g or iBurst. He currently works, part time, at the broadband connectivity solutions company assisting their customers in developing the most cost-effective and appropriate solution for their remote branches, road-warrior Streamxtvcom staff, and corporate Internet connectivity needs. He also consults on implementing firewalls and network management solutions, to help in the proper management of corporate networks. He occasionally works for http://www.OnSiteTechSupport.co.za where he advises corporate on how to cut their IT costs, and manage their infrastructure cost-effectively. Feel free to contact him at On Site Tech Support for any inquiries.
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