Is your network helping your business or holding it back?
One of the most powerful engines behind modern technology is connectivity. The ability to create and share information between a wide variety of devices, from smartphones and laptops to servers and printers, enables businesses to stay more productive than ever before.
It should come as no surprise that high-quality network infrastructure is a major priority for small and medium-sized businesses. Teams need access to reliable, high-speed connections to communicate, transfer files, and access information. Unreliable networks can lead to a whole host of workplace frustrations, bringing the pace of work to a slow and less-than-productive crawl.
Networks, of course, have changed dramatically over the past few decades. Traditional workstations and server rooms have since given way to bring-your-own-device policies and cloud solutions, making work more efficient at the expense of bandwidth. Add in network security, wireless access points, and smart internet-of-things devices, an office network quickly transforms from a simple access point to a comprehensive infrastructure challenge.
Regardless of the state of your IT – and whether it’s really doing ‘just fine’ or not – it’s critical to evaluate your network on a regular basis. Similar to a health check or a test, you need to review your IT strategy at a high level from top to bottom to make sure it’s really supporting your overall business objectives. It’s easy to recognize signs that suggest your company’s network isn’t running at an optimal level. As part of your IT health check, it’s important to look for security vulnerabilities within your network.
5 Signs Your Network is Holding Back Your Business
Users frequently lose access to network resources.
Do users frequently experience disconnections from shared drives on servers? Not only can network disruptions grind work to a halt, but they can also often require time-consuming manual reconfigurations to safely reconnect networked drives. If your employees frequently experience problems with being able to access servers, printers, or other shared resources, you may have a network problem.
Access to network resources is slow.
Selecting a shared drive shouldn’t crash or slow down a device, even if the server is packed with large files. When devices show signs of struggling when attempting to access or use a shared resource — such as a storage device, printer, or other networked equipment — there may be a large issue hiding behind the scenes.
Noticeable differences between wireless and wired network speeds.
Even when your company offers building-wide Wi-Fi for easy access, do your employees find themselves reaching for Ethernet dongles? Although wired connections can often be significantly faster than wireless connections, there shouldn’t be such a large discrepancy that workers seek out being tethered as their first choice. Sluggish wireless connections can be a symptom of many different types of network problems, and when using Wi-Fi means that work is about to take a little bit longer, it’s time to figure out what’s wrong with the network infrastructure. DWD can provide reliable and cost-effective wireless network solutions.
General internet sluggishness and web pages failing to load.
In an era dominated by Zoom calls, YouTube streaming, and gigabyte-sized file transfers, nobody has time for slow connectivity — especially your business. When web pages appear to take forever to load, video chats break up or continuously buffer, and everything else seems to be taking longer than it should, there’s likely to be a network issue at the heart of the matter.
Slowness or disconnects for remote users when accessing network resources across a VPN.
Virtual private networks (VPNs) are a powerful security tool for remote users, allowing workers to securely connect to a private network in order to access sensitive or proprietary business information. But accessing a VPN shouldn’t come at the expense of performance. When remote users start to experience significant slowdowns over a VPN or virtual desktop environment, there may be an underlying networking issue requiring further troubleshooting.
If your network is experiencing any of these issues, a full network evaluation can help pinpoint precise problems. And for companies that may not have noticeable networking issues, it’s still worthwhile to evaluate your network to ensure that it’s configured as efficiently and securely as possible. Contact DWD Technology Group today for a free security assessment or full network evaluation!
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