For many businesses, their network is their lifeblood. Getting it to work is often a key to their survival. That means optimization. A business network is a living thing, and if you don’t follow the latest technologies to keep yours up to snuff, you may be steering into some problems that would otherwise be easy to avoid.
What’s the solution? What follows is a rundown of how to optimize your business’s network, including some of the best and most popular ways to do this.
Maximize Performance
If you’re going to optimize anything, you must know how to measure its performance. Although these results will differ according to the kind of network you have, you must create solid metrics for things like bandwidth usage, throughput, and packet loss. If you have one or two of these elements giving you trouble, improving the stats might be the solution to your problem.
Blast Open the Bandwidth Hogs
Ask any network administrator what their worst nightmare is, and they’ll likely mention bandwidth hogs. These typically include streaming services and apps. Putting them on a data diet is another way to optimize your business network.
Get the Malware Out
If you’re asking the question of how to optimize your business’s network, addressing malware issues should also be at the top of your list. Malware is obviously a security risk, and it can slow down your performance significantly. Modern security tools have improved exponentially in this area, so the good news is that the overall job isn’t as hard as it used to be.
Know Your Devices
Many business owners assume that the devices in their network will last forever. Even if they do, that doesn’t mean they won’t be out of date.
Make sure your network devices are state of the art or close, and make sure you have an adequate number of nodes in your network. If you’ve got anything old or compromised that’s gumming up the works, you know what to do-fix or replace as necessary.
Do Your Quality Check Homework
It’s something of a buzzword these days, but quality of service checks (QoS) can help make sure you have enough bandwidth for critical or high-intensity services or applications. If you’ve got a high-usage task like video conferencing on your schedule, you owe it to yourself to make sure these checks are completed in a timely and thorough fashion. Make sure the network performance is there when you need it.
