Cut the Cost, Keep the Connection
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that small businesses have to watch their pennies. Particularly in the current economic climate, keeping an eye on all costs and getting maximum for value for money is more important than ever.
And in no area is this more important than with communications spend.
Many businesses never bother to scrutinize their spending on Internet provision in the same way they would examine things like car usage or air travel. There is also often an assumption that not much can be done about ISP bills except to move to another provider, and this carries fears of temporary loss of connection or having to change email addresses and/or web pages.
But the truth is that many small businesses are paying more than they need to for their Internet usage. Fortunately, the solution does not require changing providers and can often cost less than the business is currently paying in ISP bills.
The answer is the NetAssure Internet productivity tool, which can help greatly with cutting down a firm’s monthly spend on bandwidth simply by changing employ habits.
In any typical business, a great percentage of total bandwidth is consumed by employees’ private surfing and downloading. When this is not regulated, this can have a couple of implications for a business. Firstly, they may exceed their data cap under the package they have with their ISP. This then results in excess data charges, which can quickly blow out. Alternatively network speed may be throttled, resulting in frustration and an impediment to doing business. Another possibility is that the private bandwidth consumption can lead to a firm thinking that they need a faster connection and/or bigger download cap, again meaning increased cost. Perversely this can exacerbate the problem: as the connection becomes better and faster, employees rely on it for more and more bandwidth intensive usage.
Overall, the result is that companies often pay way over the odds for bandwidth that is totally irrelevant to their business activities.
NetAssure avoids this by both blocking non-work websites and reporting on individual Internet usage. The detailed periodic reporting system provides businesses with the ability to monitor their bandwidth consumption and identify that the correct and most cost effective Internet service has been applied to each location.
When staff are aware that their surfing is under scrutiny their private Internet usage usually dwindles to acceptable levels. Coupled with the block on undesirable websites, great savings in data consumption are quickly apparent. A typical result from deploying NetAssure is that the savings made by reducing the ISP plan and excess data charges are greater than the cost of subscribing to the NetAssure service in the first place. This is without even counting the savings in staff productivity or the extra features provided by the service, such as private networking and security.
Best of all, setting up NetAssure does not require major downtime or a change in provider. It often takes less than an hour to implement and no major equipment upgrades are required.
For a business operating on tight margins, getting a better performing connection for less outlay of money may sound too good to be true, but with NetAssure, it certainly is possible.