Having a reliable network connection is crucial for every business. Your network uptime plays a vital role in business productivity, customer satisfaction, and revenue generation in your organization. For this reason, you need a solid strategy for improving network uptime. However, optimizing your network performance can be a lot of work due to multiple IT tasks to deal with, making third party maintenance a perfect idea.
Outsourcing your IT tasks to a reliable service provider like CentricsIT results in improved network efficiency, significantly reduced hardware and software failure, and improved cybersecurity. That said, here are the best practices to optimize network uptime in your business.
Invest in cloud computing
High network availability is the ultimate goal of cloud computing. By delivering on-demand computing services, the use of cloud infrastructure makes your services, products, and tools available to your employees and customers anytime from anywhere, provided they’re connected to the internet. The cloud is designed in a way that the data kept in it is mirrored across the servers. So, if one server fails, data is instantly backed up in another. That way, your network users can access data quickly even after a failure to minimize downtime and loss of productivity in your business. For this reason, investing in cloud computing guarantees reliable backup solutions and disaster recovery without the trouble of setting up a physical data center, which can be costly and time-consuming.
Automate network management in your business
According to Gartner, the number one cause of network downtime is human error, making solid automation vital to every business. Automation reduces the likelihood of overlooking serious IT issues by enhancing consistency and eliminating manual configuration. As a result, it boosts productivity and saves you time and money.
So, how can you build a reliable network through automation?
Use a process automation software
A process automation software emulates the role of a network engineer in network management. It performs advanced network maintenance tasks and interprets your network’s data. The automation software also communicates with all the systems in the network to categorize, flag, and resolve potential network issues. And that decreases the average time to recover from network failure.
Optimize configuration management
Manually managing firmware and configuration updates consumes a great deal of time. Businesses looking to become more efficient need a network management tool that incorporates configuration monitoring. That way, you’ll reduce the risk of human errors and make it easy to implement changes across the whole network for maximum uptime.
Protect your network against cyber attacks
A network with security holes is likely to suffer from frequent breakdowns due to security breaches. The most common cybercrimes include Denial-of-Service (DoS) and ransomware attacks. DoS attacks flood your network with requests that slow down or crash your server, resulting in downtime in your business. On the other hand, ransomware attacks hijack your network, usually by encrypting it until you pay a fee to the attacker. To avoid becoming a victim of cybercrime, ensure all your network software applications are up-to-date to reduce security vulnerability. You should also install powerful antivirus software and ensure it’s in the latest version to efficiently flag security holes in your network.
Ensuring improved network uptime is crucial in the daily running of any business. Additionally, having network security measures in your system will help you restrict traffic entering and leaving your network.
