In recent weeks, many parts of the country have experienced regional outages from Comcast Data and VOIP services.  On November 29, for example, New England Comcast users (both business and residential) experienced a total blackout of services which were reported to be caused by large amounts of traffic on the network resulting from pre-election robocalling.

Now, just a few weeks later, widespread outages are being reported in the Midwest, with millions of users across 7 States being affected.

Dear Friends:

It’s not too late to take advantage of IRS Code Section 179 to deduct the cost of business equipment that you’ll need next year. We’ve heard from many of you who have discussed this opportunity with your accountants and taken action to claim these important deductions.

Have you considered your equipment needs for 2011- 2012? If you need to make business equipment purchases in the next year (including software), Section 179 can allow you to deduct the full cost of the expense – up to $250,000.

There may be significant changes next year, so call us right away!

We’ll get your orders processed quickly so you can take advantage of this year’s Section 179 deduction. Or, if you’ve already submitted your 2011 budgets and plan to acquire hardware or software next year, call us to discuss how you can take delivery before the end of this year.

Best regards,

Pete

People in small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) regularly connect with others who are vital to their success. Customers bring income, the lifeblood of any business. Partners, such as contractors and suppliers, provide services and products for daily operations. Prospects are vital for growth and new opportunities. And employees are the brains, hands, eyes, and ears that make a business successful.

A network can connect them all, according to Deb Mielke, operator of HomeOfficeReports.com, a Web site providing technology advice and information to small and home-based businesses. “Electronic communication is a great way to reach a lot of people,” she says. “The beauty of networking and the Internet is that it can make a little guy look like a big guy.”

But what is a network? And how can it connect your world securely, reliably, and efficiently?

Cisco commonly refers to the concept of a Secure Network Foundation which encompasses a flexible communications platform that both delivers business information needs and positions a company for growth. Note that “computer” is nowhere in that definition. That’s because networks, even in the smallest businesses, can do more than simply connect machines. They also deliver voice (telephone) and video, and connect functions such as sales and bookkeeping to make business more efficient, collaborative, and profitable.

CORE NETWORK COMPONENTS
Routers and switches are the foundation of every network, physically connecting everything. Not long ago, that meant computers, printers, and maybe servers. But now it includes wireless devices and telephones, too. As a network’s foundation, routing and switching gear should have room to grow, both in capacity (number of users) and capability.

Security means keeping a network safe from intruders, repelling computer viruses and other electronic pests, and ensuring that IT resources aren’t abused. Business owners are naturally concerned about security, and for good reason. “More and more small and medium-sized businesses today are putting critical data — company financials and customer information — on PCs,” says Craig Vosburgh, senior product manager at Verio, a company providing web hosting, online backup, and other network-powered services to SMBs. When Verio polled over 400 of its business customers last July, 70% said a single loss of business data would be “significant and costly.”

Fortunately, strong security is within reach. “There’s some very good equipment out there that’s easy to set up,” Mielke says. “Security is like an insurance policy — you want to have enough to mitigate risk, and for small business owners that’s fairly inexpensive to do.”

Wireless networks provide the freedom to move, either within your own facility or out in the world. According to Brian McCarthy, chief operating officer for the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), wireless local area networks (WLANs) — that is, wireless in a company’s own building — are the number two technology spending priority for SMBs. (CompTIA surveyed 350 North American businesses in July 2006 about their communications plans.) The same wireless technology used in-building can also support mobile and remote workers.

IP Communications lets an SMB add voice and video to the network. You sometimes hear this called Voice over IP (VoIP); the broader terms IP Communications or Converged Networks. Over 17% of SMBs have converged networks, according to CompTIA’s survey, and another 29% are moving toward convergence. Two-thirds of these businesses with separate voice and data networks see value in convergence.

Applications describes using a network for more than simply moving files. E-mail is the most common example, but other network-powered, or “hosted” applications such as customer relationship management and sales force automation appeal to SMBs, Vosburgh says. This is especially true for companies with heavier regulatory burdens, such as medical and financial practices, who want technical challenges handled by a specialist.

As IP phones become more powerful, they’re supplanting computers in some applications such as timekeeping, order entry, and inventory management so that applications are run on the phone.

RESPONSIVE, CONNECTED, AND EFFICIENT
The five core network components combine to make SMBs more responsive to customers, better connected with stakeholders, and more efficient in their operations.

•Responsive. Mielke says that networks give customers more options to communicate with an SMB, thus giving them more ways to buy. She says customers prefer network-powered interaction. “People actually feel, in a lot of ways, closer to their suppliers using things like e-mail and the Web,” she says. “It’s a faster interaction; I can interact with you 24 hours a day.”

•Connected. By providing a variety of ways to communicate with customers, partners, prospects, and employees, a network strengthens the connections that make SMBs successful. “A converged solution, to a small business, has potentially a lot more impact than to a large business,” McCarthy says, “because [small businesses] tend to rely more on the phone to touch their customers.”

Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs, use encryption and “tunneling” technology to help with securely connecting two sites over a public network like the Internet. VPNs can both connect remote workers to headquarters, and link multiple sites (such as a small retail chain) to one another.

•Efficient. “As a small business owner, the most critical things you have are people and time,” Mielke says, and networks can help get more from both. “Sometimes small business owners don’t understand that people cost them more than technology; you might make a significant capital investment on technology, but it’ll pay for itself really fast by making you and your people more efficient.” Efficiency is clearly a driver for SMBs: CompTIA’s survey showed that saving money by streamlining business processes was the top motivator for 46% of SMBs investing in new communications technologies.

FOCUS ON GOALS
As CompTIA’s study shows, network-powered converged communication technology is poised to take off among SMBs. It’s happening not because SMBs want to have the latest gadgets, but because they see business value in connecting their world. “Their goal isn’t the adoption of technology,” McCarthy says, “but being more efficient and more capable.

What is the cloud all about? Does it offer different kinds of technology-based services? Is it different than enterprise computing? Is it the next big thing?

The answer to all those questions is a resounding “yes!” The cloud brings together all these things and more to create new services to solve business problems unsolved by traditional approaches.

The cloud provides a rich, new source for bringing technology-enabled services to the business. Massively scalable services no longer need to be delivered by internal or outsourced data centers. Instead, they can be delivered by cloud service providers via their vast computing resources.

Bringing value to the business
Cloud computing shifts the focus from how an IT service is implemented or hosted, to what business value it delivers. And that’s the very essence of what a service-centric IT strategy is all about – linking services to specific business outcomes. Moving forward, we believe you’ll be asked to choose from a mix of service delivery platforms. These may include traditional in-house, managed or outsourced, and new cloud platforms. Your job will be to source, deliver and govern each service, making sure it provides the desired business outcome.

With expertise across all these environments, HP helps you cut through the confusion. We enable you to capture the business results you want and capitalize on the new opportunities the cloud offers.

Managing a hybrid services environment
Since each service delivery option brings different value to your business, you won’t need to start from scratch. It’s a matter of turning traditional models into more business-ready services and leveraging the service readiness of the cloud model.

Enhancing in-house services
Many services you provide to the business simply can’t be accessed via the cloud at this time. The security, regulatory, availability and data integrity issues may make internal platforms the best fit for your mission-critical services.

But there are ways to make your infrastructures more business-ready and more responsive to the business. For example, virtualization enables you to pool and share the servers, storage and other systems that support service delivery. You flexibly dial up capacity to keep service levels high, and dial it down during non-peak periods. This is similar to what cloud service providers do.

You may recognize this as utility computing, and we believe it’s the most efficient way to build a business-ready infrastructure.

Leveraging outsourced services
With outsourced service delivery, you gain many of the advantages of utility computing, without incurring in-house data center resource costs. You don’t own, manage or support the outsourced infrastructure or the enterprise-class applications it runs. Instead you access the services they provide via the Internet. Typically, service contracts extend one to five years or more.

Here’s where your “mixed” services strategy can start. You decide which services to outsource based on the needs of your business. The service provider then puts strict service level agreements (SLAs) around their delivery.

Scaling with cloud services
Cloud computing builds on the shoulders of utility computing. It allows cloud services to scale and flex on an exponential basis, enabled by dynamic and automated infrastructure provisioning.

Here, enterprise-class applications give way to global-class services. These deliver cloud services that support an undetermined number of users over the Internet. This helps make new types of access, capabilities and connections possible. For example, scalable software-as-a-service offerings are now available via the cloud. Further, platform-as-a-service offerings let developers access what they need to build and run applications via the cloud.

Again, you can expect to have to weigh this “elastic” service model against others in your mix. Outside the walls of an in-house or outsourced data center, security issues may be a concern. And many cloud service providers don’t yet have the iron-clad SLAs of traditional outsourcers. But it’s all about matching the right service to the right business outcome.

New access, new capabilities, new connections
With expertise in utility and high performance computing, HP reduces the complexity of sourcing, managing and governing hybrid service environments. By aligning the right technology-enabled services with the business outcomes you want, you can be business-ready and future-ready.

Worried about hackers, viruses and malware? Are you concerned that your employees can’t access their data when they’re on the road?

These are common concerns among small-business owners. The average annual loss reported by United States companies more than doubled in 2007, to $350,424 from $168,000 the previous year, according to the CSI Computer Crime and Security Survey. That ended a five-year run of lower reported losses. Average losses dropped somewhat in 2008 but remained alarmingly high, at $289,000 per respondent.

And a recent survey of 400 small-business owners by Hewlett-Packard found that small businesses place mobility high on their priority list, because nearly one-third of their time is spent outside the office.

It’s possible to address both of these issues with a single solution: upgrading your company’s computers from a peer-to-peer network to one that’s managed by a server. A server is a dedicated computer that stores and manages information and acts as a hub to connect other computers and devices.

Here’s how a server can answer the concerns of your small businesses, when it comes to safety and mobility, including:

1. Creating a firewall to protect all of your personal computers.
A server can defend every one of your company’s computers by building a protective firewall to keep unwanted elements such as hackers, malware and viruses, off your network. “This firewall provides protection to servers connected directly to the Internet or to servers located behind Internet connection sharing,” says Eileen Vee Wilson, the chief marketing officer of Comnexia, an IT services company in Roswell, Ga.

2. Offering the ability to manage all of your permissions.
Servers allow you to determine who does-and doesn’t-have access to files on your network. “I think it’s the biggest security advantage to having a server,” says Robert Gaynor, president of Boca IT Solutions, a Boca Raton, Fla., consultancy “By moving to a server-based environment, we can manage users and permissions in one cohesive database.  This adds a level of security and helps prevent human mistakes when assigning permissions to resources.”

3. Allowing your data to get saved.
Servers also offer a way to make sure all of your company’s data is backed up automatically, according to Ennio Carboni, director of product management for Ipswitch, a business software developer in Lexington, Mass. “Backup is also much easier in a client-server architecture, since the dedicated server is the sole point to copy, versus a peer-to-peer setup, where every laptop holds a piece of data.”

4. Requiring sensitive information stays safe.
“Having a server system also gives you the ability to better lock down sensitive data,” says Mark Wall, director of Microsoft Strategic Solutions at Optimus Solutions, an IT services company in Norcross, Ga. There’s less of a chance that a lost laptop can lead to thousands of credit-card numbers falling into the wrong hands, for example, because access to that information is managed by a server and doesn’t actually reside on the PC.

5. Allowing your employees access to their work from anywhere.
Accessing information on a peer-to-peer network can be difficult-and sometimes impossible-when you’re out of the office. Not so with a server, says Richard Lyons, president of Lyons Consulting Group, an IT consulting firm based in Chicago. “Mobile workers can gain access remotely to files stored on a server,” he says. “In addition, an Intranet [managed by a server] can insure that every employee has the most recent presentation and sell sheets.”

6. Affording better collaboration-even outside the office.
If you’ve ever tried to get all the members of your sales team in the room for a meeting, you know how difficult, or impossible, it can be. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could collaborate from afar? A server allows them to do that, says David Eisner, president of Dataprise, a Rockville, Md., network support services company. “Using a centralized file server better supports team collaboration and thus can improve overall staff productivity and efficiency,” he says.

7. Make e-mail easier.
Today’s servers allow your employees to access your e-mail from the road, says Paul Banco, a vice president of CiBan, an IT consulting firm in Marlboro, N.J. And unlike the POP3 accounts that you’re likely to use on a peer-to-peer network, the server-managed e-mail accounts are easier to use for remote employees. Accounts are automatically synched and your workers can access their messages from a PC, laptop or mobile device, like a PDA.

8. Stay productive with calendaring and other features.
Having a server means putting applications that were once only available on your desktop, like a calendar, on other mobile devices, according to Russell Frost, a principal at Dataccount Inc., a technology service provider to small businesses based in New York. “Calendaring functionality is available not only in-house, but also one the road,” he says.

So do you need a server? If any of these features seem appealing to you, maybe it’s time to look at making an upgrade from your peer-to-peer network. Experts say servers make sense if you have more than two employees and spend some of the time out of the office.

In the end, though, it comes down to cost. “And it is to the point now,” says Michael Proper, chief executive of DirectPointe, a Lindon, Utah, provider of IT outsourcing solutions, “where there are server solutions with all of the basic services that can be affordable for a small business.”

Now more than ever, companies are pushing their employees to work harder, better and smarter. In effect, many employees are drowning in work, are overwhelmed, less productive and don’t know which task to handle first.

If this scenario sounds familiar to you, then it’s time for our top tips and some easy-to-implement ideas you might find useful.

1. Get organized
Where are last month’s progress reports? If you’re disorganized, it’s likely that you’ll spend too much time searching for things you need. So the heart of any good productivity plan is good personal organization. Set aside a day or even a weekend to go through your PC or laptop and organize files and folders, get rid of information or programs you no longer need, and clean up your workspace. Not only is it mentally refreshing, you’ll be amazed at how much time and frustration you’ll save when you know exactly where to find that elusive progress report.

2. Identify and eliminate distractions
While ringing telephones and chatty colleagues are a regular part of office life, learn to identify when they’re getting in the way of your work. While some people can function perfectly well with noise and activity all around them, others find that even the gentle hum of a fan wrecks their concentration. If you’re the latter kind of person, don’t be shy about getting the peace you need to do your work properly. Retreat with your laptop to a quiet conference room, try noise-canceling headphones, or work from home if it’s feasible and less distracting.

3. Get plenty of rest
When your to-do list is three pages long, taking a break may sound counter-intuitive. However, you can’t work efficiently if your brain and body are exhausted — and working to exhaustion can create serious long-term health problems. So make sure you get sufficient sleep every night, and take short breaks during the work day. Even a ten-minute walk can revive you, reduce stress levels and improve your concentration.

4. Prioritize and delegate
Without some idea of which tasks are most important and require the most effort, you may lurch from project to project and waste time that could be better spent focusing elsewhere. So as part of your “getting organized” process, make a list of all the tasks you have to complete on a daily basis and rank them in order of importance. Then, decide how much time realistically needs to be spent on each one, and try to stick to that schedule each day. You may also want to evaluate which, if any, of those tasks could be done by someone else. Maybe an employee or colleague has more time or is better suited to the task. Effective delegation isn’t necessarily about dumping work on someone else — it’s just about efficiency.

5. Talk less; do more
Do you spend a lot of your working time in meetings? Meetings are often unproductive and consume essential hours of the day that could be used to do actual work. If this is the case, simply stop holding those meetings or postpone them to a day when you do not have so many deadlines looming on the horizon.

6. Reading isn’t action
You’re currently reading an article about how to be more productive at work. Well, reading about it also keeps you away from tackling your tasks. Now, let this be the last one and get to work!

File storage systems that provide automated, secure backup and additional storage capacity can play an essential role in your business’s success. The best file storage systems seamlessly help protect valuable data, make it easy for employees to share files, and require minimal maintenance.

You have three main options for file storage systems: external hard drives, online backup/storage, and network attached storage (NAS). Here is a quick look at all three options.

External Hard Drives
In some businesses, an external hard drive may be attached to each computer. The drives serve as backups to a computer’s internal hard drive file storage.

External drives may also provide additional file storage for video, high-resolution images, and other large data files. These hard drives are generally inexpensive and simple to install. However, files stored on them are not easily accessible to others in an organization. Moreover, most external hard drives don’t offer automated, redundant backup to other drives. If a big file is stored on an external drive, and the drive crashes, the data is lost forever. (more…)

Small and mid-sized businesses can be the hardest hit by new malicious code, spam, and phishing. Disruptions and down time can be avoided, however, by following the measures outlined in this article.

Introduction

The security landscape is constantly changing, so the threats your business faces today are different from the threats of a year ago – or even six months ago. The latest Symantec Internet Security Threat Report gives an overview of threat activity for the first six months of 2007. Here are a few important trends noted in the Report: (more…)

When it comes to interviewing potential employees , you need to ask the loaded questions.

That’s because hiring the right people is central to the continuing growth and success of your business. So you need to use your interview wisely — to identify job skills, target personal strengths and weaknesses and get a feel for someone’s sense of teamwork and cooperation.

But that doesn’t mean you have to wallow in a snooze-inducing “Do you work well with others?” spiel. You can interview like an expert – and get the information asked for in a query and “undercover” feedback that plays a key role in hiring decisions. Give some thought to the following six interview questions, all of which reveal more about the interviewee than you might think — or, for that matter, more than they might want you to know: (more…)

Do you live in your inbox? I do – and sometimes it gets a little crowded. I find myself using messages as a to-do list and a record of communication. When I can’t figure out where an important piece of information should really live, I email it to myself. There are times when there are more messages FROM me TO me than any other sender in my Inbox. I’m glad to say that Office 2010 is helping me to change all that. What is making the difference? First, Outlook 2010 has some great new features that have made me more productive and more organized. Second, Microsoft OneNote ships with every version of Office 2010. Here’s what makes it all work: (more…)