Without access to business applications, data and cloud resources, many organizations can’t function. In a best-case scenario, operations are severely limited, which results in low productivity, missed deadlines, lost sales, a poor customer experience and high mitigation costs. That’s why a high-performance network is critical in today’s business environment. If employees are complaining that “the network is slow,” business leaders should pay attention.
Network brownouts, or incidents of degraded network quality, can have serious consequences. A recent survey found that the average cost of a network brownout was $600,000, and more than four in five respondents said that brownouts were causing serious damage and frustrating employees. In fact, the damages and losses from brownouts trailed only network outages and data breaches among the most concerning network performance issues, according to survey respondents.
Because organizations are relying more and more upon network connectivity, the cost of brownouts is only expected to increase.
While network outages are obvious because critical business resources become unavailable, network brownouts often go unnoticed by IT teams. The survey found that more than 60 percent of brownouts and other performance issues went undetected by IT alerting systems. Forty percent were discovered by customers and employees.
One way to reduce the risk of brownouts is to implement a network performance management solution. Network performance management is the proactive, real-time monitoring of the network to prevent service disruptions and accelerate remediation when performance issues do occur. Network performance management uses wire-traffic data analytics to improve situational awareness by providing visibility and analysis across wired and wireless network environments. This makes it possible to identify early warning signs of disruption and pinpoint the source of the problem.
Network performance management solutions apply policies designed to maintain a level of performance that supports your business requirements. You needreliable network performance datato ensure these policies are properly enforced. This involves collecting and analyzing data such as dropped network packets, bandwidth consumption, and network node failure.
There are many metrics tied to network performance. The key is to focus on those metrics provide the most accurate picture of your network’s health and develop the appropriate policies for those metrics. For example, security threats are often the source of slow network performance, so network performance monitoring solutions typically include software designed to detect threats that affect performance. By logging all network performance issues, including when and where each issue occurred, IT teams can attempt to determine the root cause and identify trends that should be addressed.
Network performance management tools don’t come cheap, and require significant expertise to implement, configure, monitor and manage. Luckily, there’s a better way to ensure optimal network performance.
Organizations that don’t want to go through the process of choosing and learning to use a network performance management solution can outsource these tasks to Verteks. Our comprehensive managed services solution includes remote monitoring and management of your network, systems, devices and more to avoid costly brownouts and crippling downtime. Let us show you how we can ensure the availability, performance and security of your business-critical network.
