5 Tips to manage small and medium business IT Networks

All companies seek to secure and increase the reliability of their servers, network devices, and application assets, but each interruption reduces performance. To ensure maximum cost-effectiveness of network monitoring within small and medium IT networks, one must be able to identify and resolve problems before they affect user experience and data security.

To diagnose reliability and performance issues on complex networks you need event visibility combined with tracking capability for trends and exceptions. For example, without proactive monitoring, how can you tell if poor application performance is related to network congestion, database performance, or high user counts?

Here are 5 Tips to manage small and medium business IT Networks.

1. Maximize return on infrastructure investment to run applications

All companies must invest heavily in setting up and maintaining their IT infrastructure, whether physical, virtual, or in the cloud. The effective planning of its capacities makes it possible to target your expenses judiciously and to ensure an accurate follow-up of the ROI.

2. Anticipate and solve problems before they become Puzzles

Knowing when there is a problem with your computer system can be helpful, but anticipating problems before they happen defines the real value of an IT monitoring system. This means having the visibility to spot capacity and performance issues before they impact your systems, addressing network, storage, power, and infrastructure cooling alarms to help mitigate the effects of failing hardware.

3. Increase Workforce Productivity

The greatest asset for a company is its human capital, and also its greatest financial cost. Adopting an effective network monitoring solution turns your responsive staff into proactive collaborators. A planned approach allows you to manage your resources more efficiently and allows you to transfer the talents of your staff to higher-value tasks and increase the productivity of your workforce.

4. Ensure quality and service levels

Maintaining service quality requires IT visibility. Performance issues cannot remain unnoticed by the business while quietly eroding customer and partner trust. It is essential to opt for a solution that exposes the current problems, gives the necessary tools for analysis and automatic reports of service levels, allows greater compliance and adherence to the service level agreement, etc.

 5. Paving the way for greater scalability

System monitoring is a fundamental part of IT management best practices. By adopting a network monitoring solution, the business benefits from immediate efficiency gains and helps lay the foundation for even higher levels of automation, scalability, and resilience.

So, what other things you should do to manage small and medium business IT Networks properly?

In an era where digital is an integral part of the daily lives of the population, it is essential to give an important place to IT network security. NetworkIQ suggests implementing this to keep the security of your computer network intact and protected against external threats as well. 

a) Empower your employees: While computer attacks targeting large companies are generally thought to be very complex, in reality, they are often due to human error. This is why raising employee awareness of potential risks and good practices seems essential.

b) The importance of passwords: Password management is a major issue for companies to prevent authentication attacks. If the use of a password is essential, it is strongly recommended to use multi-factor authentication or a secure passwordless authentication solution.

Although using an easy-to-guess password seems like a minor mistake, it can cause a lot of irreversible damage. A smart password can help keep your computer system secure. There are certain types of software that hackers tend to use that have the ability to enter many configurations of a password in seconds. This is why using a simple password relative to your memory will provide an advantage to hackers.

c) Educate employees about phishing: Phishing is a scam technique that consists of recovering personal data by tricking its target with fake emails. Recurring practices make it possible to detect his emails such as:

• Fraudulent email addresses. To avoid them, companies should have a process in place to block fraudulent emails from known senders. It is also recommended to train its employees in the identification of suspicious emails so that they can report any suspicious emails.
• Imperfect spelling and syntax. Indeed, many threats are identified in foreign countries. Thus, if a reputable brand or company sends an email with faults, it is very likely that it is an attack.
• Doubtful links. Generally, the displayed links mask a fraudulent redirect. To detect them, teach your employees to hover over the link before clicking it.
• Overly aggressive calls-to-action. This is the most common technique. To trick the recipient into clicking, attackers usually require immediate action.
• Degraded graphics. Attackers are usually not good graphic designers and that’s how you recognize them. Even if they use the logos and colors of the company, for which they are impersonating, the result is generally not up to par with an official email.

d) Use encrypted wireless network points: Even large enterprises sometimes forget to protect their networks from external attacks that can steal data and network traffic information. This can lead to other types of damage to the computer system.

By using an encrypted network, you can be sure to protect the information from hackers. Having an encrypted network adds that extra layer of security that can make all the difference to the security of a computer system. So, ask experts to choose the best protections.

e) Keep an eye on the users and devices used in your company: Be sure to install a system of monitoring devices and alerts that can notify you when computer equipment is being used without permission. You will also need to find a way to identify which ports are plugged into which types of devices within your company’s computer network. Many guides are available to follow the hosts of the network. Most of the newer guides are fully automated. They only need to be configured and turned on once to warn if an unknown device is connected to the system.

To conclude 

IT occupies a central place in modern companies. Management, communication, invoicing, sales… new technologies are now adapted to all services to allow instant access to all data. This requires constant connectivity to the IT network. 

It is important to keep an inventory of all devices currently used by the network. The list will be useful to quickly check whether a particular detected device is a legitimate part of the system or placed there by a stranger. 

It is always good practice to perform regular testing of your computer network system to keep an eye out for weak spots that require the attention of security experts.

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