Employee Morale and Productivity Go Beyond the Paycheck

In a recent article published by Inc. Magazine, employers are looking for unique ways to improve employee morale in 2012. Increases in paychecks are no longer the happy-maker that they used to be.  Alternatives sighted in the article include ‘over communicating’, ‘celebrating wins’, and ‘keeping it real’.  All in all, the biggest factor for most employees is the ability to have work-life balance.http://www.inc.com/margaret-heffernan/how-to-keep-up-morale-in-2012.html?nav=linkedin

Once an anomaly for baby boomers pulling all-nighters at the office to keep up with the Joneses, work-life balance actually has a standing chance with today’s technologies– it’s called TELEWORKING.

For many business owners, just the thought of allowing employees to work from home is daunting – they perceive it to ensure lost control, lack of insight into employee productivity, and simply an administrative nightmare.  However, according to Forbes'  ”How Flexibility Can Boost Employee Productivity”, teleworking is more about adapting your work environment to accommodate for the ways in which your employees most thrive – the end goal being to increase productivity. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ccl/2011/06/29/flexibility-can-boost-employee-productivity/.

According to an article published online by the Teleworking Coalition “Will We Need Any More Office Space?”, teleworking, once considered an alternative workspace strategy, began as a corporate cost-saving measure.  While cost savings is still a predominant motivator, other factors have emerged to make the trend more compelling for employers; employee satisfaction, enhanced productivity and better teaming. As such, the use of teleworking has become not only an alternate to leasing or buying more office space – it’s become a strategy to secure top talent, increase employee productivity and job satisfaction, and in many instances, improve the overall effectiveness of a workforce.

S-NET's revolutionary Q Box allows the teleworking employees to use lower cost circuits such as cable modem and DSL - without worrying about outages or poor voice quality. It allows businesses to connect remote offices into their system. 

The Fiber Primer: Basics for Your Review on Voice and data services available on fiber optic from S-NET

Fiber Internet is better for a few reasons: [1] it's "dedicated" just for your use (not split off and shared with others nearby) [2] it's symmetrical (which usually also means FULL duplex, instead of half duplex, in other words: download and upload can occur simultaneously) [3] bandwidth is truly UNLIMITED, no hidden caps [4] includes a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which guarantees time/performance/throughput.

Generally speaking, symmetrical type bandwidth is considered "commercial grade" and tends to be used by the SMB/Enterprise market VS. consumer/residential end users. All because of the reasons I listed above, plus it lends itself to work better in a LAN environment- as the circuit is robust, efficient, and quite reliable, etc. You really get what you pay for. Finally, if you have applications that require real time traffic, such as: VoIP, SIP, and video conferencing + Citrix, VPN, heavy file transfer- commercial bandwidth (T1, DS3, Metro Fiber Ethernet) is essential.
Optical carrier services such as SONET and Gigabit Ethernet are becoming more available and less expensive as the need for bandwidth increases to support such applications as enterprise VoIP, tele-radiology, off site data backup for disaster recovery and video transport.

SONET, the Classic Optical Carrier
SONET is an acronym for Synchronous Optical Network. SONET was developed as a set of standards for telephone carriers in the mid-1980's. SONET picks up where lower speed trunk lines leave off but still maintains compatibility at the digital signal level.
For instance, the basic signal level for SONET circuits is STS-1 for synchronous transport signal. It's speed is 51.84 Mbps which is capable of carrying 1 DS3. A DS3 is the same digital signal level used by a 45 Mbps T3 line in the copper type carrier world. It is also the capacity of 28 DS-1 signals, the same as 28 T1 lines. When carried on fiber optic cable, a STS-1 signal is called an OC-1. An OC3 line would be the equivalent of 3 T3 lines and an OC48 would have the same capacity of 48 T3 lines.

SONET was designed to carry telephone conversations, so it handles the TDM (time division multiplexing) digital voice channels from PBX and telephone carrier switches easily. Because it is synchronized like the T-carriers, you can add or remove channels at will with an add-drop multiplexer. This makes it easy to interconnect a group of locations in a regional or even nationwide network.
SONET can be provisioned as a point to point circuit or hub and spoke star network, but the protocol really shines when it is set up as a ring of two independent loops. The system is designed to automatically switch from the main to the backup loop in 50 milliseconds or less if a fault occurs. This is called automatic protection switching.

Data over SONET
Like T1, SONET was originally designed to handle high capacity telephone traffic in digital format. It has since been used to carry high speed digital traffic, including backbone service for Internet Service Providers. ATM, Frame Relay, and Ethernet protocol signals can all be encapsulated and sent over SONET ring networks. If you are using a T1 or T3 data line now, it may well be carried by an optical network and dropped off and converted to the copper signal format at your location.

IP Services
Internet Protocol has become the defacto standard for data communications. Switched Ethernet networks running at 10 Mbps, Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps, Gigabit Ethernet at 1 Gbps and 10 Gig Ethernet at 10 Gbps are the basic network speeds for large and small enterprises alike. The beauty of IP based services is that a corporate network in one city can connect via an Ethernet service provisioned on fiber optic cable to a similar network in another city and they'll work like one big network. The fiber optic circuit is simply a long, very long, network cable.

The current trend is to convert everything into IP format so that telephone calls, file transfers, Internet service and video conferencing can share the same network. That process is called convergence. Converging all those proprietary networks into one big one often has cost savings benefits especially at the enterprise level. You'll just have to be sure to have enough network bandwidth to handle all the extra data packets and quality of service management tools to ensure that voice and video signals get the priority they need to run as well as they did on their own networks.

The Continued Threat of Phishing Attacks for SMBs

The Continued Threat of Phishing Attacks for SMBs

Phishing is an IT headache that is here to stay. But what is the clearest threat to your SMB clients--social media or garden-variety spam?

By Tim Sprinkle

Traditional spam emails remain the number one electronic security threat to SMBs, according to the results of a recent IT survey commissioned by anti-spam filtering software provider SpamTitan Technologies (so remember that grain of salt). That’s despite the high profile increase in phishing attacks perpetuated via social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, says the company.

Although 37 percent of IT managers surveyed did admit that online phishing is a growing problem for SMBs, 75 percent called tried-and-true spam attacks the top security issue they face on a day-to-day basis. Social networking-based intrusions remain marginal threats at best, especially given the overwhelming prevalence of email scams.

According to a Microsoft Web security report released in 2009, spam accounts for more than 97 percent of all sent emails, and the Palo Alto-based Radicati Research Group found that spam costs businesses some $20.5 million annually in lost productivity and IT downtime.

But are phishers starting to shift their focus from email to social media? Opinions are still divided on that point, with 31 percent of respondents dismissing the appearance of a rising Facebook threat as simply a result of the increased use of social networking sites by business users. More users equal more targets, after all, though it can be tempting to extrapolate that there are more phishers at work in the social networking sphere as a result.

The SpamTitan findings jibe with a report released earlier this year by Kaspersky Labs that found that just 5.7 percent of phishing attacks in the first three months of 2010 could be traced back to Facebook. Compare that to HSBC, eBay, and PayPal, which together account for more than 52 percent of all online scams, according to Kaspersky.

Either way, phishing is an IT headache that is here to stay.

“Phishing attacks remain a clear and present threat to businesses,” says Ronan Kavanagh, CEO of SpamTitan Technologies. “There is no evidence to suggest that network security measures are discouraging the number of phishing attacks; it is simply that the arrival of social networking in the workplace has presented phishers with a bigger pond to phish in.”

As far as prevention is concerned, Kavanagh suggests that IT managers establish clear policy guidelines and educate their users on the various types of electronic threats facing their networks. Awareness is the number one tool in the fight against phishing attacks, he says, whether they come in via email or social networks.