Optimizing Your Corporate Network: The Five Basic Elements You Need To Address

When you run a firm that has branches spread out over a wide area, you will definitely need to use some kind of network for communication purposes. The fact that such networks make communications faster means that you will be able to run your business more effectively, something that can increase your profits drastically.

The one problem you will need to deal with from time to time is making sure that your current network can sustain your needs. Most IT managers in such firms often want to have a situation where the same network will always be adequate for communication, which means that no drastic changes will be needed to upgrade the network. However, this is not the case.

These days, everyone from regular consumers to corporates is using increasing amounts of bandwidth to communicate, since the media used for doing this are becoming of higher quality each day. When your networking infrastructure is not regularly tweaked to accommodate this, you may end up finding that communication is becoming more and more difficult each day for your organization.

This basically means that every once in a while, you need to tweak such a network to ensure that its bandwidth is optimized for efficiency. Some of the key issues that need to be addressed when doing this include:

• Estimation of your bandwidth needs

When you feel that it’s time to upgrade your network to accommodate faster communications, you will need a goal to work towards. One can’t simply make changes without knowing what they need to achieve. To do this, you will need to assess what your current and midterm needs will be in terms of bandwidth, and then try to upgrade the network to accommodate this. This way, you will then have an enhanced network that will not only serve your current needs adequately, but your needs in the near future as well. It also gives you a scope of how much work needs to be done on the network.

• Elimination of bandwidth wastage

When running a corporate network, one thing that might slow the system down is unnecessary bandwidth wastage. For instance, when you deploy applications across your network to other branches, some of them might not be configured properly and may end up using up massive amounts of bandwidth. When trying to evaluate the system, you need to do an audit of such wastage and then deal with them. This way, even if you institute other measures to make communications much faster, your efforts will be a lot more effective.

• Address security issues

When most people are thinking of ways of improving network speed, they rarely think about issues to do with security. However, you need to remember that when a network is not secure, it is bound to slow down in one way or another. For instance, any external parties may take advantage of the security weaknesses, and then end up using some of the resources of the system. This might in turn result in a slowed network either directly or indirectly. Of course, in the setting of a corporate network, security problems might also result in loss of business when your information is leaked to other parties. This is therefore an issue that has compound effects, denoting why it’s important to have it fixed as soon as possible.

• Pay attention to network utilization trends

Understanding how your network is currently used will give you an idea of what needs to be done in order to optimize it. You can also use this information to get an estimate of what your needs will be in future, since it is said that the bandwidth needed doubles every 18 months especially if you upgrade your applications regularly.

• Have a revision schedule

Once you have made all the changes you want to optimize the network, you can’t afford to sit back and relax. You need to keep revising it every now and then to keep it optimized, which will in turn keep your business operations running smoothly. This is something that most people ignore when they are looking for ways to optimize their networks, but which is a critical component of the whole process.

As you can see, there is a lot that needs to be done when overhauling a corporate network. Though it might sound tedious, it’s a process that is worth every second and penny that you spend on it, since it will always have an impact on your company’s bottom line. It is therefore something that you need to focus on.

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Chad is a blogger who has written numerous guides on network optimization and management. He highly recommends expanding business to use the HughesON managed solutions suite for such purposes.