There has been a growing trend toward the reduction of operational computing costs in small and medium sized businesses for the last 15 years. Drops in hardware and software costs have fueled this reduction. Enterprise computing has come down to the smallest of enterprises. The low cost and easy access to high speed internet has accelerated thegrowth of iternet applications. Both of these trends have lowered costs.

The growth of trasnsaction based processing of financial and mail transactions on the net has been astounding. Small businesses can run Virtual Private Networks between offices and across the globe. Backup applications, allowing for backup and safe storage offsite have proliferated due to the ease of net connectivity. Why would we use postal systems when we can transmit gigabytes of informtaion simply and easily over the net.

The impact of the net has been profoundacross society. New types of communication such as social networking and internet messaging have emerged and are mainstream. Today's internet savvy individual can call someone on Skype at no cost wherever they are in the world. This means a rapid reshaping of the public telephone landscape.

The challenge in using the internet is thati t is different things to different providers depending on where the last mile connection is. The last mile referring to the telephone company or cable company cable connection running to the location you are in. Beacuse of this it is not wise to run all of your connectivity off this one access. Enterprises using mission critical applications are wise to diversify their connections for maximum reliability and protection.

Time sensitive applications such as voice may suffer from your connectivity when net enabled. The quality of line required for specific applications may not be the same and you could be at risk of packet loss and dropped connections. Always delpoy mission critical applications with a backup point of entry and exit to the public networks and other connections. Sometimes a point to point connection can provide the best choice over comlete internet connectivity.

Not every internet connection is created equally, even from the same provider. Cost savings in one area, may need to be re-invested in to new areas to allow the organization to do more with less but with multiple options for our security and access.