ganizations to have mechanisms to protect applications from power outages, brief power interruptions, and natural disasters such as hurricanes and tornadoes. Cloud services allow small companies to operate without a data center, and most of the medium-sized companies only require two or three servers. For small and large organizations alike, cloud services provide many of the management tasks previously performed by in-house technical staff. However, even with cloud services, IT staff is needed to monitor security and secure access to applications in the cloud. Employees often bring expectations for capacity, accessibility, and user-friendly interfaces from their experience as residential customers. Residential customers can easily access Facebook, Snapchat, and Google from mobile devices and laptops. Employees www.TechnicalPDF.com expect the same level of service for work-related computing tasks. They anticipate the applications they access to be always available, easy to use, and accessible from mobile devices and remote locations. This is an ongoing challenge for IT personnel and management. Organizations are meeting these staff expectations through unified communications, collaboration software, and easy-to-access desktop video conferencing. Unified communications is the ability to access company directories and voice mail messages from within a single e-mail inbox. Collaboration software, which mimics Google Docs and Box services, enables employees to share documents, edit documents written by other staff, and keep up-to-date on group projects. Telephone system manufacturers such as Mitel and Cisco often include these applications and capabilities in their systems' platforms. To meet staff expectations for access to applications, organizations are taking steps to prevent delays and ensure continuous uptime. They are investing in higher capacity switches to transmit growth in LAN traffic, and LAN monitoring software to quickly spot and resolve equipment and software glitches. WHAT IS A LAN? A LAN is a local n