Thursday , 28 March 2024

How To Improve Network Management And Enhance Security

With network administration, there is a focus on assets and resources, including switches, routers, and servers. It also involves updating software as needed. It includes the management and monitoring of all network operating systems.  With proper network management, you can improve the productivity of your IT as well as security. Many companies prevent security breaches when they use effective network management strategies. Moreover, you gain a broad view of network performance. Strong network management also helps avoid expensive disruptions.

There are challenges with network management. For example, infrastructures are often complex, and security threats continue to grow significantly. With a large network, all the devices and components need to work together well, and as a company grows, the network needs to appropriately scale as well.

Network management is a broad term referring to how you manage and maintain everything that’s part of your computer systems in a business. This includes the procedure and how you use tools, and the core objectives of network management include efficiency and reliability. With the importance of network management in mind, the following are tips to improve it within your business or organization.

Use A Monitoring Tool

One of the biggest problems with network management is often that it’s slow. What’s important to realize is that it’s likely not the network itself causing that slowdown and is instead probably something like an application that uses too much of the network’s resources.

If you have a monitoring tool, it gives you an easy sense of visibility into any issues that may be happening with the network, so you don’t have to guess about where the slowdowns are occurring. With a network monitoring tool, you can quickly see where your resources are going and spend time remedying the issue instead of finding it. Use the top internet monitoring tricks as well. Then, you can solve issues even faster.

With a network monitoring tool, you can see if any devices are experiencing downtime, and you can see bandwidth usage that’s contributing to bottlenecks. Other things you can see with network monitoring include:

  • Servers uptime

  • Website availability and broken links

  • Online activities

Train Employees On System Usage

Another reason network slowdowns may occur is because too many people try to access it at the same time, and that’s something that you can fix with proper training and education. The biggest reasons for slowdowns that are related to users are typically from things like streaming music, but it can also come from sending big files by email and other work-related tasks. Train employees on how their use of the system impacts its performance and how they can individually take steps to reduce these impacts.

If you don’t have network policies in place, you should create and implement them. If you have visitors of any kind, create a specific network for them, so they aren’t slowing down your network resources. Another way to manage your resources is to use a Virtual Local Area Network or VLAN. These will allow you to separate your resources and prioritize traffic based on importance. When you implement a VLAN, it can create a separate network, but you don’t have to rewrite everything. You can also group VLANs based on their function.

Use Traffic Shaping

Traffic shaping relates back to network performance problems stemming from the bandwidth applications use. You might be surprised to see how much is being used when you measure bandwidth. Traffic shaping limits how applications perform, and they can prevent bottlenecks, although people in your organization may not like it.

Teach Stakeholders About Network Data

If you’re an IT professional, it may be easy for you to understand network data and performance, but not everyone is going to be the same. It’s up to you to help all key stakeholders understand it in a clear, relevant way. Create reports that management is going to be able to understand as far as your network output and bottlenecks. Make it relevant to them, so they understand how it affects them.

Finally, if you need to schedule administrative tasks, try to do some during the lowest traffic times in your organization. For example, backups can use a lot of data, so if you do them frequently or daily, then run them at night unless there’s a reason why you can’t. If you have a time of the month that’s pretty intensive, such as the end of the month in terms of accounting and financials, plan ahead for that.

As an IT professional, you’ll probably do monthly tasks like data cleaning and system sweeps, and if so, plan them around what other people in your organization are doing so that you’re not competing with one another for data usage.

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