With the ever-increasing demand on IT staffs to keep mission-critical messaging and collaboration applications running 24/7, the IT departments of many small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are feeling the strain. This is causing IT and C-level personnel alike to question whether to manage their IT resources in-house or to outsource to a hosting provider.

SMBs with IT staffs may have a sense of security and feel that they are in control of their data when it resides in-house, but many SMBs do not have the financial or personnel resources required to utilize enterprise-class applications to help grow their business. In contrast, however, the advantages of working with a hosted services provider can include a lower total cost of ownership, no need to purchase new hardware or software, continuous uptime guarantees, daily backups, management and 24/7 monitoring, the latest software, and well-trained support.

The choice to partner with a provider of hosted services is a significant business decision. For some SMBs, the burden on IT is becoming too time-consuming and is stealing the focus of their internal staff. Other businesses do not have the human resources to set up a full-service IT staff and offer their employees enterprise-class applications. Still others, such as those who want to upgrade their e-mail from Microsoft Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007, for example, incur great expense with the required purchase of new 64-bit hardware and the training of existing Exchange administrators on new installation and administration requirements.

In addition, all of these groups may share a fear of potential downtime. What many of them do not realize is that working with a hosting provider can mean their IT services will be up and running almost immediately, at minimal cost, with guaranteed uptime, around-the-clock support and usually with no contract to sign. (Editor's note: Make sure your service-level agreement with any hosted service provider covers these items to your satisfaction.)

Outsourcing IT services to a hosting provider does not require any upfront investment in hardware or software infrastructure. In contrast, deployment of any new applications in-house can be a significant expense and might cause setup delays, as well as the requirement for training of support personnel. After the initial installation, however, is when the majority of expenses are incurred in maintaining mission-critical applications.

The in-house deployment also requires spare storage in addition to continuous proactive monitoring to ensure continuous uptime. Popular hosted services such as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and customer relationship management are immediately available, scalable and can be conveniently managed through a Web-based interface.

While partnering with a hosted service provider might seem like an easy decision based on these advantages, there is some hesitation among organizations about losing control of their data, especially e-mail. This apprehension is understandable considering that up to 70 percent of business data resides in e-mails. A company maintaining a close watch over its data, however, cannot guarantee a higher level of uptime.

Support from hosting providers goes beyond the services they offer, as providers often invest time, capital and personnel in ensuring continuous uptime, as well as 24/7 server monitoring and customer support. With redundant servers installed for automatic failover, customers can be assured of up to 100 percent uptime. This high degree of uptime is not always possible with an in-house solution. Hosted service providers also keep spare parts and servers on hand for quick replacement in the event of hardware failure.

In addition, hosted data is continuously monitored by application-monitoring software and trained experts in hosted services. Should a security issue arise, such as a virus attack, hosted service providers are able to act quickly to prevent these harmful attacks from reaching their customers. Providing 24/7/365 technical support is also a requirement of best-in-class hosting providers, as companies conduct business around the clock or work in different time zones.

The requirements of mobile workers are also an important consideration. No longer are employees accessing e-mail or sharing files solely in the office. Employees now work all hours of the day or night from the office or on business travel. Fueling this need to stay connected is a myriad of mobile devices that significantly blur the lines between home and work. E-mail, calendars, contacts and tasks that were previously only available at the office are now available anywhere at any time when utilized as a hosted service.

Once the decision to outsource key business applications has been made, the actual shift to hosted services is a quick and simple process. Benefits include: demands on the IT staff are reduced, allowing it to focus on other critical tasks; corporate executives see a reduction in expenses and a potential increase in revenue with the use of enterprise-class services; and all employees are able to access their data any time of the day or night from anywhere in the world.

Ravi Agarwal is CEO of 123Together.com, Burlington, Mass.

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Managing voice matters

by Benjamin Ellis

Today, quality of service (QoS) is the foundation for deploying voice over IP. As IP applications started to proliferate, QoS started to emerge as the way to prioritize between different applications.

The normal approach to QoS takes a network perspective. A network link may have poor QoS, but if it is carrying hundreds of voice calls, it is not clear what that means for the performance of a specific user's call. The view only comes from taking a user perspective. Moving from managing network availability to managing network performance also opens up other new dimensions.

QoS can be described in terms of packet loss, jitter and delay. Each of these can cause problems for voice-over-IP (VoIP) clients and devices, but only when they appear in certain combinations. An IP phone may cope with jitter or with packet loss, but not be able to compensate for both at the same time. There are also other, harder-to-detect network disturbances that can affect voice performance, such as out-of-order packets and asymmetric routing.

The original architecture for IP had traffic flowing from workstations to a concentrated set of dedicated servers. This system still exists today with the focus on high-capacity servers delivering applications from the data center.

Voice is different from other IP applications in a number of ways:

Voice is a real-time application, highly sensitive to network performance.
Voice traffic is often any-to-any, like peer-to-peer applications.
Voice performance directly impacts the human user experience.
Voice is bidirectional and interactive.
Voice crosses the analog and digital domains.

If part of a word is cut out or distorted during a call, that conversation is disrupted in a way that is impossible for users to miss. Retransmitting packets does not help, as they will no longer be useful when they arrive. The network has to get it right the first time, every time. The management tools have to be able to detect that the network got it wrong. Not all voice faults, however, are caused by the IP network.

Voice depends on the IP network infrastructure, but it also depends on the performance of the public telephone network (PSTN), voice gateways and phone handsets or soft clients. The most common voice performance issues are ones that were familiar in the early days of the cellular phone networks: echo on the line, background noise, distorted sound, or overly quiet or loud speech.

Even the most sophisticated QoS tools cannot account for these problems, because they are not IP network issues. They are actually invisible to the network domain, as they take place inside the IP packets and outside the IP network.

Network-management tools focus strictly on monitoring packets, and do not go beyond the IP headers. The industry is now starting to talk about quality of experience as a phrase to describe the performance parameters that go beyond QoS. These parameters are familiar to the voice community, but just as IP QoS parameters combine to affect performance, these voice parameters also combine.

There are two main measures of voice quality. The first is listening quality, which can be described for each direction of the call. Second is conversational quality, which looks at both directions of the call combined.

Voice is unique in bridging between the analog world of human beings, and the digital world of IP. That uniqueness requires a different approach to managing it and dealing with specific issues. Network managers have to analyze voice from an end-user, rather than a network perspective.

Voice performance issues can remain invisible to network-management tools, but still cause user dissatisfaction. These tools should move seamlessly from an overall view of performance across the network and beyond it, down to identifying a fault in a single call.

Benjamin Ellis is the vice president of global marketing at Psytechnics, Portsmouth, N.H.

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