The following is intended as a background information for the reader and is provided to share general knowledge about information technology and emerging solutions.
We are providing the information to those visitors of this site to promote increased awareness, as a source of information sharing and to help promote good industry practices. You may request additional information by either contacting us on this site and by email or by phone.
Am I not getting better service utilizing a T1 Circuit to the Internet vs. Cable, DSL FIOS or other service?
Possibly, but that depends on what better service means to you.
Let’s consider a few facts. A T1 circuit has a speed of 1.54Mbps (that’s mega bits per second) and the bandwidth is symmetrical. That means the downstream (receive ) and upstream (send) are equal 1.54Mbps down/up. DSL, FIOS and cable lines are frequently asymmetrical (referred to as ADSL) in which the downsteam and and upstream transmit at differing speeds in which the download speeds are higher. These services can be ordered for additional fees as symmetrical circuits.
DSL, Cable, and FIOS (fat pipes) with the exception sometimes of DSL can be much higher bandwidth circuits and are available at a much lower price point. Some fat pipe provide 10-20 or more times the bandwidth at a fraction of the cost. Some will argue that the bandwidth on a fat pipe is shared and you may not get full throughput. Without getting deep in the weeds on the technical details the argument holds some water. However if I am getting a 50% throughput on a pipe with 20 times the bandwidth I still have 10 times the throughput.
Additionally opponents will cite Service Level Agreements as justifying the additional cost and lower bandwidth. In our experience we have not see a difference in service levels between the various services in a business environment. If there are repetitive problems the circuit most likely needs re-engineering. However for redundancy you could in your business order a two fat pipes from different providers, i.e cable and DSL or FIOS at a lower cost, improve redundancy, and have considerably more bandwidth.
Should I allow my employees to utilize personal devices including home computers, smart phones, laptops to access email and other office applications even if the access non sensitive information?
No! There are a variety of technical and legal issues that expose your organization.
By allowing your employees to use personal devices your business is exposed to their personal security habits and may create vulnerabilities that could lead to malware, trojans from infiltrating your environment, and an ultimate compromise of your corporate devices and information.
Additionally by allow employees to use personal devices you are placing your company information in peril as the employee has ultimate administrative rights over the device, your business is not in a good position to wipe a device, encrypt data at rest and retrieve your property as employees leave the organization.
Without strong information assurance practices your business is at risk from both insiders within the organization and outsiders. Organizations must take comprehensive measure to protect themselves or suffer the losses. Read more on this topic here.
What are the benefits of using Internet based email filtering services?
Web based email filtering services keep spam, phishing attacks, trojans, and other malicious content away from your IT environment. This improves the security of your environment by reducing threats while also reduces overhead on Internet connections, local email servers, reduces then need to manage or maintain 3rd party hardware of software that run on internal devices at a very reasonable cost.