►What is Voice over IP?
The Basics
used with permission from the Cisco Small Business Center.
What is voice over IP? How is it different from unified communications? And how can it help your small business?

What is Voice over IP?
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology lets you use the Internet to make and receive telephone calls.

What is Voice over IP?: The Range of Services
VoIP is available in a wide range of services. Some basic, free VoIP services require all parties to be at their computers to make or receive calls. Others let you call from a traditional telephone handset or even a cell phone to any other phone.

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If we had no winter, the spring
would not be so pleasant.

Anne Bradstreet
 

►Just for Laughs

Back in 1965 when the Rolling Stones told us to get off their cloud, they may have been talking about teenage alienation. Today, however, getting off of someone else's cloud could very well be the theme of many midsize companies as they rush to develop their own private cloud.

Whether you're an IT professional or a business manager, if you work at a midsize company that hasn't already made the leap to the cloud, you're probably considering it. Maybe you're hesitating because of worries about the security of customer information in the public cloud. Perhaps you can't tolerate the idea of abandoning all the costly hardware investments in your own datacenter. Or possibly you want to follow a hybrid approach, using the public cloud for some of your computing needs but retaining key IT functions on premise. If one or more those concerns apply to your situation, then you may want to consider deploying a private cloud environment.

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Virtualization technology is a great way to increase business agility while reducing infrastructure costs. But it can also add another layer of management complexity, resulting in higher management costs and lower ROI. You need the right software tools to realize the full benefits of virtualization.

Managing virtualization becomes even more critical as virtualization projects move out of the development/test environments and into production. That's why it needs to be incorporated into your operation management framework. Rather than manage virtualization as its own silo, a better approach is to integrate virtual and physical management - based on proven best practices. Then you can administer resources uniformly to monitor, manage and automate key management functions seamlessly across physical and virtual environments.

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There's little doubt that the Internet has been a real benefit to organizations – providing instant communication capabilities and an almost bottomless source of valuable, up-to-date information on just about any topic.

However, many employees won't think twice about accessing the network for personal use, perhaps to download music or to shop online. Not only does this put a strain on the network by reducing the bandwidth available for legitimate use, but it also makes it easier for criminals to access sensitive company information and for viruses to enter the network.

From an IT standpoint, it's a hassle to deal with employees downloading unsafe material on the one hand, and complaints about how slow the network is on the other.

So what's the best way to effectively limit employees' network use and keep the network safe, without hampering productivity or creating distrust? Here's a list of do's and don'ts to help you put together a network usage policy.

1. Don't block access to things like IM applications or YouTube without consulting employees.

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