Small business leaders are often tasked with making critical decisions about technology with little background in the field. ATSI assists by walking business owners and leaders through the technology solutions that are available, affordable, and feasible for the scale of the organization.

If you've been researching your options, we thought this brief and simple glossary might help: 

• Broadband Ethernet - Broadband Ethernet refers to Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) and is often a great solution for small to mid-sized businesses with the connectivity they need. Ethernet provides improved speed, security, reduced latency, and consistency over WiFi, but is a little more complicated to deploy.
• Cloud Solutions - A myriad of solutions and services hosted on the cloud, including networks, storage, services, applications, or resources, are defined as cloud solutions. The providers who offer these solutions are called Cloud Service Providers (CSP).
• DaaS - Desktop-as-a-service, or DaaS, refers to using a third party vendor to host your desktop, handling data storage, backup, security, and upgrades so you don't have to stay on top of these things in house. In a desktop-as-a-service model, your employees connect to a virtual desktop hosted and managed out-of-house.
• DRaaS - Organizations must have a plan in place to ensure their data can be recovered or replicated after a disaster. DRaas, or disaster recovery as a service, refers to replicating servers by a third party as a part of a business continuity or disaster recovery plan.
• IaaS - IaaS, or infrastructure as a service, refers to outsourcing servers, storage, networking firewalls, the physical data center plant or building. IaaS can be especially beneficial for companies who need to do big data analysis, support web apps, host a website, or set up and dismantle test environments.
• ITaaS - IT as a service (ITaaS) refers to the delivery of IT services by an internal or external IT service provider. In this model, hardware, software, and IT support are provided by one central service provider.
• MPLS - MPLS stands for multi-protocol label switching - which is a technique rather than a service - and is a way to ensure that real-time application connections are reliable. MPLS provides predetermined routes for data transmitted over the internet so routers don't have to "think" about how to get the IP packet where it needs to go.
• PBX hardware - A private branch exchange (or PBX) is a private phone network that allows users to connect securely despite a complex network of internal and external connections. Because of the complexity of setting up a PBX, organizations often select a third-party vendor. 
• SIP - Session initiation protocol or SIP forms the foundation of communication sessions by establishing sessions, terminating sessions, and managing the signaling throughout the session.
• Trunking - Like the trunk of a tree, supporting a complex network of branches, trunking in business communications is a network that handles multiple audio, video, controlling, or image signals simultaneously. Trunking allows many users to access a single network.
• Unified Communications (UC) - Unified Communications refers to the ability to access a variety of communications solutions anywhere, any time including SMS, instant messaging, email, voicemail, meeting invitations, VoIP calling, video calling, web conferencing, screen sharing, and more. UCaaS, then, refers to Unified Communications as a service. 
• VPN - VPN refers to virtual private network, which allows users to connect securely to the network over the internet. VPN can be especially helpful if employees need to work on secure platforms remotely.
• WAN - A wide-area network (WAN) refers to a network infrastructure that is owned by a service provider that typically spans across substantial distance,uses carrier equipment, and implements routing protocols. SD-WAN is software-defined networking in a WAN.

To learn more or explore your options, reach out to ATSI, your specialists in Business Communication Systems, today.