These devices can better accommodate a growing network and, therefore, your growing business.

As your business grows is your network prepared to grow with you?  When building your small business network, you undoubtedly used stand-alone switches to connect employees to the resources they needed. But as a burgeoning small business, you may be finding that managing individual switches and adding new switches is a complex process. If that’s the case, it may be time to consider implementing stackable switches.

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Tags: small business, small business network, stackable switches, switching

Everyone seems to have their head in the “clouds” these days.  At my house, we are CNN junkies.  If you want to get the low down on top business news of the week in a humorous way, watch Quest & Ali (Q & A).  They recently discussed, “Should you ditch your hard drive for the cloud?”  Being a consumer and/or a small business it’s a decision worth investigation.  By using the cloud over a hard drive, you can access your data from anywhere, it’s more efficient and you can’t lose it.  US eCommerce says, sales for cloud computing equated to 142B last year and an added 100B expected this year.

The old school hard drive users are not quite there with the cloud.  They realize it’s the future but not yet.  Some feel the cloud offers too many risks with security, viruses and bugs.  They also don’t believe it is more cost efficient to use a cloud server than their own hard drive.  Small businesses have found cloud computing to be worth the risks according to 75 percent of respondents to a Cisco survey.  At my house, my totally tech husband can’t wait to have our home computing in the cloud.

Tags: cloud, Cloud Computing, small business

If you’re a small business owner, or a multi-hat-wearing entrepreneur, and you’re not a member of the Cisco Innovators Program, you could be missing out. There are dozens of reasons why you should take part, but primarily it comes down to the simple fact that technology can help you reach and exceed your business goals and get ahead of your competitors. Want to increase your bottom line? Would you like your business to grow? Do you want to be able to quickly and easily communicate with your vendors and other contributors involved in your company? This program can help you do all of these things.

Join Cisco Innovators Program for free. A great perk is that by joining, you could win one of three 16G Apple iPad 2s. All you have to do is select either the BizWise or TechWise newsletter to qualify for the iPad drawing.

Tags: innovators, small business

We offer a few tips and staying legit to ensure your messages don’t set off spam alerts.

Information is the lifeblood of business. To protect your small business, you’ve put safeguards in place to protect your critical information, such as a firewall, antivirus and antispam software, and maybe even a web threat or intrusion prevention system.

The methods for sending spam continue to evolve and considering that malicious webmail represented 7 percent of all web-delivered malware in March 2011—an increase of 391 percent from January 2011, according to Cisco 1Q11 Global Threat Report, it’s not surprising, then, that you and your customers have spam filters and extra precautions, cranked up to block any potentially dangerous email. So how do you ensure your important communications actually reach those you do business with?

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Tags: email, security, small business, spam

Things to consider when buying a wireless routers for your small business.

We live and work in an untethered world, and your small business is no different. When you initially built your network, you may not have seen the need for wireless. Now that your company has grown and your workforce has become more mobile, you may be considering adding wireless to your network. Wireless offers a lot of benefits, such as  allowing your employees to work from anywhere and providing Internet access to visiting guests.

If you’ve been looking at adding wireless connectivity to your company’s network, you know it can be confusing. There’s the alphabet soup of standards—“b,” “g,” “n”— and terms like “dual-band,” “selectable,” and “two radio.” What does it all mean? Below, I explain the basics so you can better understand which wireless router best fits your needs.

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Tags: networking, small business, wireless network, wireless router