Today’s digital landscape is ripe with opportunities, but it can also be very complicated. From a proliferating number of options to manage your network to the increased threat of cyberattack, it’s difficult to keep up with all the changes. And while technology has brought us many benefits, it has also created a burden of responsibility.
As an organization, you have a responsibility to protect your data, perform your core business functions, and provide a quality service to your customers. To do this, you need a network infrastructure that is efficient, secure, and robust enough to handle the digital transformation journey. But how do you achieve this?
To help you out, we’ve compiled some top tips for streamlining your current network and migrating from legacy infrastructures. From taking the assistance of professional managed IT services to automating mundane tasks and enabling data compression, these simple tweaks will ensure you are both equipped and ready for whatever comes next.
1) Never Miss on Necessary Updates and Upgrades
To protect your business from cyber threats, you need robust, reliable infrastructure. One way of ensuring that your network is up to date is by ensuring that you stay abreast of all necessary software updates, including those for firewalls, routers, operating systems, databases, and cloud services. By staying informed on these matters via tools such as regularly updating your own threat intelligence feed or setting alerts from third-party providers like Cisco Umbrella.
Additionally, it’s also important to review and update critical applications in order to ensure their compatibility with newer versions of operating systems or platforms. Software vendors often offer instructions for how to upgrade their products but also frequently send out notifications when upgrades are available. Don’t be afraid to test new updates before deploying them into production environments; a certain amount of risk mitigation should always be part of any deployment decision.
2) Serve Your Guests an Isolated Network
You never know who or what your guest might bring with them when they come visiting. If you don’t isolate their network traffic, it’s possible that a problem could spread beyond their device to impact other computers and devices within your network.
To prevent these issues, it’s best to offer your precious guests a completely isolated WiFi network and route all of their communications through proxy servers hosted by your IT department. This way, if any malware or viruses are introduced on one of their devices during a visit, they won’t be able to propagate throughout your entire infrastructure.
3) Use VLANs
Partitioning your network into Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) can help you prioritize a specific set of applications or processes. This allows you to streamline performance, improve security, and reduce costs. By setting up multiple VLANs on your network and assigning them different priorities, services hosted within one VLAN will have faster connections than those in other areas.
For example, by giving a team of developers their own designated space on your infrastructure with higher bandwidth access, they’ll be able to collaborate more effectively when working on new features for your application or website. Additionally, you could set up additional VLANs for less critical services such as guest WiFi. These devices won’t need high bandwidth, so it’s okay if their VLAN only has limited capacity available.
This is also important from a security perspective, as guests may bring malware onto your network inadvertently; creating separate networks ensures that any issues can be contained quickly before they spread to all parts of your infrastructure.
4) Always Monitor for Bottlenecks
In a perfect world, your network would always perform at top speed, but that’s simply not realistic. You will often find yourself having bottlenecks in certain areas or with a specific device. In these cases, you’ll need to identify which areas of your infrastructure are slowing down your overall performance and tackle those issues head-on. One way of doing so is by installing hardware and software firewalls along with diagnostic tools on various nodes within your infrastructures, such as routers and switches.
5) Data Compression
On top of maintaining a stable infrastructure, you also need to ensure that your data is traveling as quickly as possible from point A to point B. In order to make sure that your precious data is always on hand when it’s needed most, you should consider compressing sensitive information before sending it out into the world.
By compressing large files such as videos and images, you can reduce their size by 50 percent or more and also increase their speed. This isn’t always a necessity for local transfers between two computers in your office, but if you’re transferring files across long distances via a wide area network (WAN), then these techniques can help make sure that they reach their destinations faster than ever before.
Improve Your Network Infrastructure
As can be seen from these simple tips, streamlining your network doesn’t have to take an incredible amount of time or resources. By identifying problem areas on your infrastructure and making some small changes, you’ll be able to address problems quickly and eliminate bottlenecks that are slowing down performance. Now that you know how easy it is to streamline your network, go out there and make sure that your data is always getting where it needs to go as quickly as possible!