Networking technology is forever evolving and it’s indeed hard to catch up with it all. For a small business hard-pressed to find enough time to conduct business, any learning curve associated with building a robust network to spearhead business operations is an expensive one. Is there a way to lay a great foundation for a robust network for a small business? Of course, there is. Here’s how:
Gauge your company’s needs: Not all businesses are built in the same way. That fact can be extended to networks too and hence not all networks are the same. The first step is to take a detailed view of the kind of network your company might need. According to Cisco[1],
“it’s an extremely important first-step to gauge your company’s needs and requirements along with clear goals on what your company intends to gain out of the network being built”.
When investing, do it the right way: It’s often believed that you get what you pay for and that holds really apt for networking foundations. Switches and the very basic elements of a strong network and when investing, don’t look to save money. Invest only in business-grade quality of switches and routers to make sure that your communication protocols remain reliable, safe and almost unfailing. For instance, don’t look to deploy home networking products for business purposes (unless your business is small and you have no intentions of growing it).
Think ahead, design now: With time, your business will grow and so will the demands on your network. Your network will need to accommodate new demands as your business grows such as allowing for streaming audio and video across the network, web–conferencing, data security and management, data sharing, Voice over Internet Protocol ( VoIP), wireless communication and much more. Think ahead and build a network that can absorb all these demands that will be made in the future. Building a network for future is better than upgrading networks each time a new demand surfaces.
Design networks for business continuity: Nothing hits you harder than when business has to take a backseat to allow for technical issues or networking issues (to be specific) to be resolved. Networks have to be built with business continuity in mind. Redundancy, reliability, network security, network monitoring, data backups, data restoration are all factors that have to be considered before building and designing a computer network for your organization.
Without keeping these foundation steps in mind, no network is worth it. More businesses can fail instead of growing when these nuts and bolts jitter and come off loose due to improper, half-hearted and amateur network design attempts. If you need help, you have it available. You’ve run out of excuses too, don’t you think?
Tell us what you feel about these foundation steps. We’d love to hear from you.
[1] Cisco
714-333-9620