Is Your IT Team Keeping Up with Network Monitoring Best Practices?
Hacks and data breaches are all over the news. If your business handles or retains customer information, you probably shudder inside when you hear of yet another major company disclosing a data breach. Practically every week a new network exploit is discovered. Staying on top of the ever-changing landscape of IT best practices takes serious effort and unflagging attention to detail. Consider the following network monitoring best practices and evaluate whether your company is keeping up.
1. Employ Network Monitoring
Remember the expression “mind the store”? You’d always have someone watching the front door, right? You’d want to know if someone wandered in who shouldn’t be in your place of business or who was obviously up to no good. Using a network without employing network monitoring is like leaving the store or the front desk unattended: you’re asking for trouble. You need someone using the latest tools to monitor your network 24/7.
2. Determine Your Network Performance Baseline
Too many small- to medium-sized companies skip the crucial step of determining what “normal” is for their networks. If you don’t establish this before putting pressure on your system, you don’t have the baseline you need to know what approach to take when something goes wrong. Do you need more bandwidth, more processing power, more storage space, or some mix of the three? Establishing a network performance baseline can help answer this question.
3. Define Who Is Notified and How Escalation Should Work
Spelling out a notification and escalation plan is another network monitoring best practice. You don’t want your software notifying the entire engineering team when something minor goes wrong, but at the same time, you want to reach the correct number of people at the right levels if a problem escalates. What you don’t want is for it to be up to the on-call employee to decide on his or her own who to contact in the heat of the moment of crisis. Establish procedures ahead of time.
4. Future-Proof Your Network
You don’t want to build a network that’s just barely adequate for your current needs. Growth is inevitable. But how do you accurately plan for growth? Look for a network monitoring solution that offers capacity planning and can predict when you’ll need more power or space.
If your Des Moines company isn’t following best practices for network monitoring, it’s time to outsource it to a dedicated IT team who does. Contact Infomax Office Systems today to learn more.
