Business

Improving Network Performance for Better Business Outcomes

These days, business success hinges greatly on network performance capabilities. Sluggish internet connectivity can grind operations to a halt, losing productivity and revenue. On the flip side, nimble, optimized networks accelerate data delivery, workforce mobility, application performance and customer experiences. With the right strategies and modern technologies, even small companies can affordably build robust networks that drive measurably better business outcomes.

Rightsizing Internet Bandwidth

A solid foundation starts with having sufficient bandwidth from internet service providers. Too little bandwidth creates frustrating bottlenecks with frequent buffering and slowdowns. But over-provisioning also wastes money on unused capacity. Regularly assess bandwidth demands based on number of users, applications, cloud/SaaS usage and multimedia needs, then scale bandwidth up or down as requirements change.

Prioritizing Critical Traffic

Beyond just overall bandwidth, configuring Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities to intelligently prioritize and optimize traffic flows proves critical. Network equipment and software can categorize incoming data packets by type and user-defined policies. Latency-sensitive video conferencing streams, VoIP calls and business-essential SaaS app data enjoy top priority routing while lower-priority web browsing/email traffic gets demoted, eliminating laggy hiccups. 

Implementing SD-WAN 

For multi-location organizations, SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) technologies have emerged as a game-changing upgrade over traditional WAN infrastructures. According to the experts at Hillstone Networks, SD-WAN solutions use intelligent software to dynamically route traffic across multiple WAN links (broadband, LTE, MPLS, etc.), based on real-time monitoring of quality, cost, and priority policies.

Traffic is automatically diverted to available highest-quality paths, improving reliability and performance while reducing expenses by leveraging affordable commodity broadband. SD-WAN also simplifies centralized WAN management across all locations.

Accelerating SaaS and Cloud Access  

As organizations increasingly offload applications and workloads to SaaS providers and public clouds, optimizing network connectivity to these third-party resources becomes paramount. Cloud acceleration services provide secure internet gateways that automatically route SaaS/cloud traffic over the fastest links while also minimizing bandwidth consumption through data deduplication and compression.

Without optimization, latency-prone internet routing for SaaS apps like Office365, Box or Salesforce hinders performance. Purpose-built cloud acceleration not only improves responsiveness but offers simplified security/firewall management and centralized web gateway protection.

Upgrading Wi-Fi Throughput

Most business network issues stem from inadequate Wi-Fi infrastructure for reliable, high-bandwidth wireless connectivity demanded by users and IoT devices. Modern Wi-Fi 6 standards offer major throughput improvements over past generations. Access point placement, minimizing interference, and Wi-Fi spectrum management also enhance coverage and speeds.

Many companies benefit from managed Wi-Fi solutions offering turnkey design, deployment, ongoing optimization, and centralized cloud management of wireless infrastructure. With so much business-critical traffic now relying on Wi-Fi, robust high-performance wireless becomes essential.

Implementing Network Monitoring   

Even with optimized architectures, networks need continuous monitoring and troubleshooting to promptly isolate and remediate disruptions or chokepoints before they severely impact operations. Network performance monitoring solutions provide comprehensive visibility across the entire distributed infrastructure for applications, users, traffic flows and security incidents.

Modern AI/ML-driven monitoring platforms automatically establish performance baselines, then alert on anomalies while pinpointing root causes to guide fast resolution. Proactive monitoring prevents minor issues from escalating into major, costly outages.  

Securing the Network Foundation

Finally, no discussion on enhancing networks would be complete without addressing security fundamentals. Today’s intricate networks usher in a much larger attack surface that cyber criminals are all too happy to exploit through malware, DDoS attacks, unauthorized access attempts and more.

Advanced protection like firewalls, encryption, authentication mandates, micro-segmentation and real-time threat monitoring lay the critical cybersecurity groundwork upon which high-performing network operations can reliably proceed.

Conclusion

With the proper architectural upgrades, cloud/SaaS integrations and management processes supporting them, businesses gain distinct competitive advantages by future proofing their networks. Not taking network performance seriously means settling for subpar outcomes.

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