Does your business rely on software to function? If it does, how does that software operate? Chances are, you’ll have a few cloud-based services in your employee’s everyday business toolkit.
In the modern business climate, getting a job done quickly is important for you to increase efficiency and customer acquisition (fast results impress everybody), which will help you to increase your growth in the long term.
Getting good, trustworthy, and competent employees are one sure-fire way to improve efficiency, but they are only as good as the tools that they use. Unfortunately, if you use lots of cloud-based software, you are likely aware that you can be slowed down.
Unreliable networks can be a nightmare for any business owner, and they can have very real effects on your bottom line. The more cloud-based solutions you use, the more likely you are to have problems with your network reliability, as they will each compete for bandwidth in the local area network (LAN).
So, What Does That Mean?
Essentially, the strategy you use to manage your bandwidth will have a direct impact on the maximum productivity of each member of your business’s network. If a system on your network is competing for bandwidth, it may have moments where it struggles to get an IP address using DHCP, meaning it won’t be able to interact with the rest of the network and IT support will be needed.
If you are a tech-heavy enterprise, constant slowdowns can interrupt employee flow, which you should look to preserve at all costs.
( Also Read: 3 Things to Look for When Exploring Network Monitoring )
What Should You Do About It?
The solution is simple: monitor your network so you can manage it properly. You can either use professional network monitoring tools or roll up your sleeves and start reading. If you want to manage your network manually, you need to be very comfortable with computers.
With a software solution, you get a good visual idea of how your network is running, get alerted when something is wrong, get told what’s wrong, and then go about fixing it.
Some network management software fixes small problems automatically; automation of administrative tasks relating to each device on your network makes the process easy and doesn’t consume much time, so there is little employee cost.
It can also complement your IPAM (IP address management), which allows you to keep track of each statically assigned address in your network.
If you decide to go the manual route, you need to get well acquainted with SNMP terminology, but it’s worth noting that implementing a solution manually takes a lot of time, involves much lower efficiency, and, unless you have a tech wizard on board, is infeasible with sophisticated networks.
The manpower required to make it work tends to make it quite expensive, but it depends on the nature of your industry. A manual solution would be ideal in a small tech start-up where every employee has a keen interest in computing and can take shared responsibility for monitoring the network.
