The business environment today is based on data transfer, and you need to ensure that your network infrastructure remains reliable, fast, safe, and available 24/7. This is quite a challenge in today’s dynamic business environment, as you can often experience surges in traffic that can overwhelm essential network functions and slow down response times.
To prevent this from happening, enterprises have to incorporate network optimization. This includes integrating a range of tools, strategies, and best practices that make it possible to monitor, manage, and improve network performance at all times.
So, how can you optimize the network infrastructure in your business? Below are five crucial techniques you can use.
Hardware and Infrastructure Upgrades
For your network to offer the highest levels of performance, it needs to have high-quality hardware and infrastructure. This is especially a crucial consideration for growing businesses as an increase in business demands puts more strain on the network. Take time to go through your network components, including routers, switches, access points, and network interface cards. You can find that it’s an old switch or router that is causing the frequent bottlenecks in your network, and upgrading it will restore order.
When carrying out your analysis for upgrades, ensure that you also look at the underlying infrastructure, such as the cables and connectors. If they are outdated or can no longer serve your increased business needs, upgrade them to improve overall efficiency.
Quality of Service (QoS) Implementation
There are lots of bandwidth-intensive applications in the business environment, especially with most enterprises increasingly using cloud services. However, some of these applications have a higher priority than others, and you can set this within your network. Through Quality of Service (QoS) implementation, you can prioritize certain types of traffic over others. A key focus in this area is usually voice over IP (VoIP) calls and video conferencing as they are time-sensitive. When set up, you can ensure that communication and collaboration across the business are effective even during periods of congestion.
While setting up QoS, ensure you go through all the business applications that the enterprise uses. You can then note down the critical ones, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, and give them priority over things such as web browsing and file downloads.
Security Enhancement Measures
Networks are always under threat of unauthorized access and malware attacks. And if any of these happens, your business operations will be compromised or even paralyzed. To ensure that your network is secure, you will need to take a multi-layered approach. The network should be able to prevent threats as well as handle any interruptions that occur.
As a bare minimum, ensure that you have firewalls and intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDS/IPS). These will help you monitor everything happening in your network, and they will also block potential threats in real time. You should also implement access controls and authentication mechanisms to ensure that only authorized individuals can access certain applications, and they can only do what they are authorized to do.
Traffic Shaping and Load Balancing
You can have a situation where a particular server is over-utilized when others are relatively free. This is not ideal as it leads to congestion, but it can be solved through load balancing. This technique involves measuring the utilization of network resources to identify what traffic is coming from where. This information is then used to distribute incoming network traffic across multiple servers.
Through distribution, load balancing makes it easy to avoid bottlenecks. But beyond that, it also reduces latency, improves the availability and reliability of services, and ensures all your resources are properly utilized.
Regular Maintenance and Updates
Network optimization is a continuous process, and the basis of it is ensuring that everything continues to work as it should. This means that you will need to do proactive maintenance to identify and address potential issues. You’ll also need to install upgrades and patches to address any vulnerabilities, fix bugs, and improve the overall stability and performance of your network devices and software.