Have you ever wondered how much internet bandwidth your business actually uses on a typical day? Of course, it depends greatly on the sort of business activities (and non-business activities) that your employees do while in the office. It may help to imagine your internet connection as a pipe, and the bandwidth of your connection determines how large the pipe is. Each online activity happening in the office fills the pipe in an amount equal to how much bandwidth that particular activity consumes.
You may be surprised to see that basic office tasks, such as sending and receiving emails and working in cloud-based applications or databases (i.e., Salesforce & Microsoft Office 365, etc.), are what we call “transactional” tasks and really don’t require much bandwidth at all. The more bandwidth-intensive activities include the constant movement, or “streaming”, of high-quality video, screen sharing applications like GoToMeeting, as well as large file uploads and downloads.
It’s easy to see from advertisements that most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are engaged in a race to the top to offer the highest amount of bandwidth possible. What isn’t so clear though is that the cloud-based businesses that use the internet to provide their services are actually in a race to the bottom, to use the least bandwidth. By using as little bandwidth as possible, their services are faster and more reliable on lower bandwidth connections, and appeal to customers who are using their services and often multitasking with others while at the office, at home, or on a mobile device.
It probably goes without saying that, as bandwidth increases, so too does the price of the connection. Is your business paying for too much bandwidth, or for bandwidth that isn’t needed for revenue-generating activities? With one of our internet firewall gateway appliances, you’ll have complete control over what sort of data may come and go over your business internet connection, in order to provide security and maximize your bandwidth investment’s ROI.
For more information on how we can help you to rightsize your internet bandwidth, contact us!
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