With the rise of digitisation in the workplace and the benefits this helps provide, the performance of your small business network is increasingly important. This is the infrastructure that allows your devices to connect and talk to each other while facilitating the functions of your tech stack. These tools help you to better optimise your processes and productivity, so getting the most out of your network means enabling your business to perform better. If you’re unsure how to improve your network infrastructure, consider investing in effective network management.
What is network management?
A great way to get the most out of your network is through monitoring, managing, and analysing its performance. Of course, this is quite an involved process that can be difficult to account for when you and your team have other responsibilities. By investing in managed network services, you are able to leverage the experience of outsourced professionals, known as managed service providers (MSP) who act as an extension of your team to remotely operate and monitor your network.
There will be variations in the offerings of different MSPs, but their service often includes:
- Remote set-up of alerting and monitoring systems
- 24/7 automated remote monitoring
- Dynamic service desk
- Monthly service reporting
- Management of patches
- Management of problems and incidents
- Improvement of service.
How network management can improve your business performance
If you’re looking for ways to boost the performance of your business, consider investing in a managed network. Let’s discover how it could improve the effectiveness of your organisation.
1. More time to focus on growth
As a business owner, you have a lot of responsibilities that you need to think about, including pathways of growth for your organisation. Adding network management on top of that can be overwhelming and can take up important time that you could invest elsewhere. However, this is not something that should fall through the cracks since it can impact your business and may lead missed opportunities.
Network management can help relieve this concern and allow you to focus on what you do best – running your business. Rather than spending your time putting out fires, you can turn your mind to areas of improvement that help you enhance your processes and boost your overall performance. The same goes for the rest of your staff, particularly your IT team if you have one. If not, it saves you the time of having to call someone else in for help if issues with your network arise.
2. Make the most of your applications
Your business applications and tools are the key to creating a more streamlined business environment, consisting of quality processes and increased security measures. This includes services like unified communications, cloud computing, firewalls, and threat detection. However, to access this improved environment, your tools need to be able to effectively connect and communicate with your devices. So, when your network isn’t operating at its peak, you may not be getting the most out of your tech infrastructure.
With network maintenance, monthly reporting, user admin and device monitoring from your MSP, you can gain visibility of how your network is performing and how your devices are connecting. Once any issues or inefficiencies are identified, they can reconfigure and correct your network functions, supporting your applications to help reach their full potential. If maintained, this can lead to more quality outputs.
3. Deliver uninterrupted service
When your network goes down, it can have a considerable impact on your business. Certain functions can be forced to a halt, which may affect customer service, productivity, and your team’s ability to complete their responsibilities. When this happens, it can have downtime and reputational costs that bring down the performance of your organisation.
With a managed network, your MSP can help prevent these disruptions with near real-time automated monitoring and altering. They will be notified if any red flags appear on your network and can investigate faults or issues as they come up. This helps to resolve small problems before they become major issues that compromise your network. The result can mean less downtime, enabling you and your team to maintain performance and productivity.
4. Invest more funding into the business
Any opportunity to reduce your business spending frees up funding that you can put towards improving your business. Not only that, it lowers your profit margins and means you need to invest less to see success. A managed network can allow opportunities to make this happen by helping you to reduce your costs.
Investing in this service can be done through contract terms that spread costs over a long period, reducing upfront spending and improving your cash flow. Not only that, your MSP can assess your business environment and offer network software and tech solutions that align with the way you operate, saving you from trial and error and the risk of a poor investment. It also saves you the expense of paying a dedicated, in-house IT team. Instead, you can just call the service desk if any issues arise.
5. Access the latest upgrades
Staying on top of tech innovations offers a way for your business to maintain a competitive edge, and possibly lead the market with new and exciting strategies that can boost your performance. Of course, the ever-changing nature of the technology landscape can make it hard to stay on top of the latest available upgrades, particularly when you have other responsibilities.
With network management, your MSP can handle this for you. They can implement patches or updates almost instantly, allowing you to access the latest upgrades to your business system. This helps get the most out of your business performance while offering new opportunities you may not have been able to previously leverage.
TBTC Brisbane South is ready to handle your network management
Allow us to manage your network while you focus on your business. We’ll get to know how you operate and offer tailored network management services that support your goals and plans for the future. Talk to us today, and let’s get solving.
