Much has changed since Kerio's first soft router/firewall product was launched in 1997. The predominant small business Internet connection options at the time were dial-up and ISDN, the Web was still in version 1.0, Spam was a luncheon meat, and the Cloud consisted solely of water vapor. Through all of the advances and improvements in technology since then, many businesses still face the same problems. Sure, the Nigerian prince email scams have been replaced with more sophisticated phishing attacks, and the Netflix pop-up ads are, well, still Netflix pop-ups (although at least the shoot the monkey ads are mostly gone), but surfing the web for the most part still seems slow. The reason for this is simple; home Internet bandwidth has increased so much that an average business connection seems positively tortoise-like by comparison. But a business connection has a much better data rate, doesn't it? For the most part, yes. Even here in Silicon Valley, there is far more copper than fiber available to most businesses. Then, of course, there is the old "speeds of up to" condition that ensures you will never see the 20Mb downloads speed promised unless the stars are properly aligned. But the data rate isn't the issue; it's the usage.

At home, you may have Xbox Live competing with a Hulu hosted TV show and a Skype video chat for a meager 1.5 Mb ADSL connection. However, odds are that they are not all engaged at the same time. In the business world, let's look at a 10Mb fiber connection at a typical 30 person office. First you have email, which, even with a decent anti-spam gateway will consume a five percent chunk of bandwidth. Then you have your cloud based solutions like CRM or Web Conferencing. Online account access for purchasing, banking and other services take another slice. Internet chats, remote backup, VoIP, and inter-office file transfers consume an even bigger piece. This is all before you add in the biggest bandwidth hog of all; casual browsing. The knee jerk culprits, Facebook and Twitter, while a waste of time, are not a waste of bandwidth; most employees are smart enough to access those from a mobile device by now anyway. It is video and music download sites that are the real bandwidth chupacabras. Even when browsing legitimately (a hypothetical situation) so many sites have embedded video and audio that there isn't much bandwidth left over for downloading the latest security patch for Windows XP (much less LOST season 5).

Depending where you are, 10 Mb may seem laughable (Scandinavia) or imaginary (Montana). Regardless of the bit rate, odds are that the more access you have to a resource the more you will use it and performance will become an issue. As a business owner, you may have to reconsider that promise you made to yourself that you would never restrict or monitor employee Internet access. If not, you may consider adding a second Internet connection from competitive vendor. In addition to teaming connections to get a bandwidth speed that you otherwise couldn't attain or afford, you get failover should one of the network providers experience problems (not that that ever happens). If link load balancing isn't an option, you should reconsider becoming Big Brother. Without knowing what people are doing online you can't really establish or enforce a reasonable fair use policy and you can't accordingly reserve bandwidth for the most mission critical, uses. Think of it like the free sodas many businesses provide to their employees. It's perfectly okay, if someone goes through six cans Diet Dr. Pepper throughout the course of a nine-hour workday. That doesn't mean they should be able to fill a shopping bag with six cans to take home at the end of their shift.