Managing Your Business Network: An Important Factor To Grow Your Company

In the early days of starting a business, many business owners out of necessity wear multiple hats: they are the chief bookkeeper, the head salesperson, the computer troubleshooter. As a business grows and matures, the successful business owner recognizes when his or her time is more valuable in a leadership role, and quickly delegates tasks that are neither profitable nor integral to leading a company.

When delegating the role of technology guru, this task frequently lands on the shoulders of someone in the office who has a technical aptitude, and sometimes an outside vendor is enlisted to help.

In either scenario, there is an essential tool available to business owners today that can help minimize the challenges of managing increasingly complex technology, and maximize the productivity of the employees using the network. In recent years, network monitoring technology has emerged that was available previously only to large enterprises. In fact, this technology now does far more than mere monitoring, and if your IT vendor doesn’t offer this kind of service, you should consider speaking with one who does.

A good analogy of this kind of monitoring is to think about driving your automobile down the highway. If you are concerned with getting to your destination safely and quickly, you’ll want to know if your engine is overheating or if a passenger door has come open. You don’t want to actually have to get out and stick a thermometer in the engine every few miles, or pull over to check your doors. This is why the gauges and alerts on your dashboard are so useful. At a glance you can see that everything in your car is running smoothly.

While not all monitoring services are equal, a competent managed services provider (MSP) – that’s industry jargon for an IT company that provides monitoring – will ensure their service offers the following:
• A dashboard where you can view the status of every device on your network and quickly see important performance metrics like available memory and processor power;
• An alerting system that can contact you or your IT vendor when a critical business system experiences an error or crash. Even better: an alerting system that warns you before something bad happens on your network;
• The ability to automate routine items like system updates and security patches, or re-starting services that have stopped;
• Asset inventories, including hardware and all installed software;
• Website monitoring and alerting;
• Data backup and antivirus monitoring;
• Regular reporting.

Considering the investment most business owners have in their companies and technology, adding a dashboard to their network just makes sense. If they have an employee who is tasked with maintaining the network, this kind of tool can vastly simplify their job, freeing them up for more productive work. The return on investment is often measured in terms of weeks, and you will quickly find that you are less stressed by the unknowns on your network and more confident that your business engine is running smoothly, ready to get you to your next destination.