Tag Archives: proactive network monitoring

Five Questions to Ask About Proactive Monitoring of Network Infrastructure

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20160623

Proactive monitoring of network infrastructure is a critical strategy that can help you prevent problems before they develop. It’s important to ask questions!

Neglecting to monitor your network infrastructure is a fundamental mistake that significantly increases the chances of a successful cyber attack and impairs your network’s performance.

As discussed in a recent article from Beta News, companies need to acknowledge that they’ll not only face cyber attacks, but that some of these attacks will likely get past their initial defenses. While it’s important to use anti-malware programs and other first-line defenses that can initially repel many cyber attacks, you need to realize that you’re never guaranteed 100% protection from unauthorized intrusions.

As such, it’s important to maintain layered defenses and actively monitor your network for suspicious activities that could indicate a successful intrusion. Proactive monitoring of network infrastructure is a critical strategy that can help you prevent or detect various problems before they develop into crisis situations.

Keep in mind that while IT disasters can result from an external cyber attack, there are also other sources of IT emergencies, including equipment and connection failures. So not only is network monitoring a critical part of your cyber defenses; it’s also essential for preserving the general health of your IT infrastructure. Network monitoring enables you to respond to a problem in a prompt, effective way without waiting to first hear about it from frustrated or panicking employees who find that they suddenly can’t get their work done.

Ask your Managed Service Provider (MSP) about monitoring services

When you hire an MSP to manage and advise you about your company’s IT activities, make sure to ask them about the kinds of monitoring services they provide for your network infrastructure. The following are five important questions to ask:

  1. Will they provide proactive monitoring of your company’s network? Sometimes, IT personnel take a purely reactive approach to IT problems. They swoop in to try and fix an issue only after employees have started noticing it or business operations have slowed down or come to a halt. Make sure that the MSP you work with offers proactive monitoring.
  2. How frequently will they monitor your network? Ideally, proactive monitoring will take place round-the-clock, every day of the year. It’s not enough to only sometimes scan your network or devices for problems, or limit the monitoring to business hours. Your MSP should offer you a 24 x 7 x 365 service.
  3. How will they respond to problems? Let’s say there are signs of trouble in your network, suspicious activities, or an outright emergency. How will your MSP respond? Who is actually responsible, and what will they do? Are there limits to what their monitoring service can detect? While you don’t need to know all of the technical details, you should get a clear sense of how they will use network monitoring to act effectively and swiftly.
  4. Will they let you know what’s going on? It’s important to establish clear communication between you and your MSP, including protocols for when they notify you about problems. Even when there aren’t any problems, they should give you regular reports about the state of your IT health, along with recommendations for changes to improve the security, productivity, and cost-effectiveness of your IT set-up.
  5. What kind of information will they give you? Ideally, your MSP will use the information they glean from network monitoring to give you a strong picture of your IT infrastructure, its strengths, and its potential weaknesses. They should provide you with advice for how to strengthen your network’s performance and security. Instead of just doing the bare minimum to keep your network going, they should actively contribute to its strength and development, with an eye towards supporting your business goals and activities.

Please contact us for further information about our round-the-clock proactive network monitoring. We’re dedicated to improving and maintaining the health of your IT infrastructure.

24 x 7 x 365 Proactive Monitoring of Network Infrastructure-Your Business Safety Net

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Without a safety net in the form of proactive network monitoring, you run the risk of costly outages and other potential disasters.

Without a safety net in the form of proactive network monitoring, you run the risk of costly outages and other potential disasters.

Picture the scene. A hush falls over the crowd as they crane their necks to see the small sequin-clad figure of a girl walking a tightrope high above the stadium floor. She walks sure-footed for a few steps and then, unexpectedly, she begins to wobble. Something has gone wrong, though the crowd cannot discern just what is it from their vantage point on the floor. She tries to correct her balance, and a collective gasp of horror rises from the audience as she loses her balance and falls for what seems like an eternity before hitting the carefully positioned safety net below. She bounces once, twice, and a third time before flipping easily down to the floor, unharmed. She raises her arms to show the crowd she is all right. The crowd erupts in applause. While the crowd will forever remember the girl, the unsung star of the event is the safety net.

Just like that girl on a wire, your business processes run day by day with seemingly sure footing. However, what happens on those occasions when something goes amiss? Where is your safety net? 24 x 7 x 365 proactive monitoring of network infrastructure can keep your business from the disastrous results of a network failure.

The key to the success of this type of monitoring lies in its name. It is proactive. Rather than waiting for a failure to happen and then stepping in with a sometimes complicated, time and labor-intensive fix, proactive monitoring anticipates the failure and moves to address potential issues before they become critical. Thus, catastrophe can often be avoided entirely. As the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

How does this monitoring work? All day, every day, data is collected regarding the performance, health, and status of your network infrastructure. Based on data received, optimization features are triggered, which increase the productivity of your system and ultimately, the profitability of your entire enterprise.

Imagine the security of knowing that someone is watching your systems day after day to ensure every component of your network is working optimally at all times. While in-house IT support can provide a good level of care, it is likely that your business does not have around-the-clock coverage with on-staff IT professionals. The expense of maintaining 24 hour in-house support is often prohibitive. But the fact is that you need 24-hour-a-day support, because system failures do not historically occur just during regular business hours.

Proactive monitoring can often be paired with proactive maintenance support as well. This means that your network is maintained at optimal levels on an ongoing basis. Monitoring and associated maintenance ensures that backups take place at regular and appropriate intervals and that any security patches needed to keep your system up-to-date are handled in a timely manner.

Just as you expect your in-house IT staff to be knowledgeable regarding current issues that might impact your network infrastructure negatively, proactive monitoring ensures that emerging threats can be neutralized as quickly as possible.

Does proactive monitoring slow down your business processes? The simple answer is, no. This type of monitoring is completely unobtrusive, allowing you to proceed with the every day routines of your business workflows and processes without hindrance. Tweaking your system as needed, proactive monitoring provides peace of mind for you and your staff, optimal performance of each and every component of your network infrastructure, and increased productivity that comes from a reduction of downtime caused by random system failure.

If this sounds like something that would benefit your business, please contact us today. We can show you how proactive monitoring can work best for your enterprise.

24 x 7 x 365 Proactive Monitoring of Network Infrastructure: A Thematic Analysis

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24 x 7 x 365 network monitoring and support is crucial for ensuring your data stays safe and backed up at all times.

24 x 7 x 365 network monitoring and support is crucial for ensuring your data stays safe and backed up at all times.

When it comes to modern software and cloud-based hardware deployments, 24 x 7 x 365 proactive monitoring of network infrastructure  accompanies hosting, maintenance and support in order to create peace of mind and reduce stress and dissonance in business owners’ lives.

Introducing the Theme: Chaos and Dissonance

It is late at night, and your phone lights up. Your website just received emails from multiple people complaining that their accounts are inaccessible. 30 minutes later, your entire IT team has been called into the office to manage the software. After 3 hours, the sun comes up, and you start crafting emails to your customers explaining how a key server went down without proper back-up. Everything they had created on your site over the last 2 weeks since your last backup is lost.

Variations on a Theme

Variations of this nightmare scenario have been experienced by businesses of many shapes and sizes, where key network infrastructure is not properly backed up, does not have great redundancy, and the data loss is catastrophic. Whether data loss from storage or just a site going down for hours, days or weeks, many businesses will be catastrophically impacted by the effects of major infrastructure problems.

When you add the problems caused by growing beyond your infrastructure, network infrastructure significantly impacts your labor and capital bottom line. For many businesses with customers and employees in multiple areas, there is significant risk to the business from local events like earthquakes and fires which do not impact the rest of your target market. For local businesses, your customers and employees can understand data loss during shared catastrophe, but with global customers and multiple employee locations through telecommuting, you cannot afford to lose your computer services, even for an understandable catastrophe.

Resolutions of the Theme

In order to maintain and grow your business without the fear of catastrophic data loss, 24x7x365 Network support and management is necessary. For managed assurance, your network support team must be able to deliver service which prevents the same problems that keep you up at night. Look for the following standards to ensure that your proactive monitoring is secure and efficient:

  • Multiple Data-Center Backups – If someone is providing you business recovery, they have to have better infrastructure than you can provide in your office. This includes RAID5 servers in multiple locations so that neither hardware, software nor an act of God will cause a permanent or catastrophic data loss.
  • Fast Back-Up Recovery – What are your monitoring team’s processes for getting you back up and running in the event your in-house IT goes down? Good systems have automatic processes to switch to the backup hardware in the event your site or online software goes down. This needs to be automatic via a programming call, not manual entry.
  • Experience with Multiple Systems – With modern business systems, software, hardware and delivery systems are becoming increasingly more integrated. With cloud-based software deployments, many times a series of servers will run more than one business’s software and hardware products. Your proactive monitoring and support team needs to know the different parts of cloud-based infrastructure and be prepared to manage IT efficiently both remotely and in person.
  • Training – Sometimes the best way to learn something is to teach it. If your proactive monitoring team cannot teach your in-house IT and other employees how to manage software, servers and other IT hardware, they have not learned what is necessary to keep you from getting nightmares concerning their IT support.

Do not let your IT keep you up at night. With real-time monitoring, hosting support, managed software plans, training and professional installation, modern IT outsourcing is more effective and cheaper than many business owners have experienced in the past. To learn more about proactive monitoring, hosting and disaster recovery, please contact us.