As a business owner, you know that any employee on a shared network means that it needs to be reliable and needs to be maintained. What happens if your IT infrastructure goes down. Ensuring that your business gets back up and running quickly without a huge loss of data, employee down-time and infrastructure loss is incredibly important.
Here are 3 ways that can help prevent your business from a network failure:
- Be prepared: this is number 1 for a reason. Having guidelines and procedures set up in case of a failed network is important for IT planning. What happens if a network goes down? What is the troubleshooting that will take place? Who is responsible? Not having procedures and protocols laid out can result in longer delays to resolution and greater costs involved due to greater employee downtime and more payment to contractors due to lack of planning. Without a plan in place your business could scramble to get your feet back on the ground.
- Monitor and manage networks: Proactively managing your businesses networks will allow the IT department to see big problems before they occur. This means that seeing a trend within the infrastructure will allow the IT team to consult on the best course of action to remedy the issue before it escalates. Far too many businesses “react” to issues instead of being “proactive”. Having greater visibility into the network will help create a smoother running network, create greater productivity for employees and result in not having to “fight fires” each time there is a problem.
- Back-up data: Backing up data is integral to recovery after an outage or a down served. There are many ways to backup data; locally, to the cloud or integrating both. Unfortunately for many small businesses back-up is not highly regarded and many businesses may back-up only once a week or every few weeks, which is simply not enough. Back-ups should be done daily and they should also be checked and tested. If the back-ups aren’t successful, then retrieving data in case of a network failure could be quite a disaster. Customer details, employee info, sensitive data gets lost, if not properly backed up.
- Anti-virus and Malware: If we have learned anything in the past couple of years, no one is fully protected from hackers, malware or viruses. Protecting your network end to end is important to protect from data loss, file corruption and potential virus attacks. We have seen too many times security programs that haven’t been updated or that have simply been disabled. Protecting a business from intrusions means having safeguards in place to protect from such attacks and regular maintenance of anti-virus software.
Although managing your company’s network can seem complex, leaving it in the hands of an IT company can help alleviate and address those concerns. The consequences of downed server(s) can be catastrophic and you don’t want to take chances with your business. Contact us today to learn how we can help protect your network from failures, attacks and downtime. Looking forward to hearing from you!