Your business network is integral to what you do. It’s the backbone of your business, and if it’s not supporting you how it should, then problems can pile up fast.
But this doesn’t need to happen to you. You don’t need to be part of the 70% of businesses that delay infrastructure refreshes or have downtime be the biggest cause of loss and risk within your daily operations.
These tips can help you build a business network that keeps up with growth so you can do what you do and grow when you need to.
Audit Your Network
One of the best ways to build a business network that keeps up with growth is to start with an audit.
You need an accurate picture of what you’re working with, and you cannot make improvements if you don’t know where improvements need to be made.
Your audit needs you documenting every device on the network. Mapping traffic patterns, identifying where bottlenecks are, and understanding what your current hardware can and cannot handle.
An audit allows you to identify everything from routers that can’t handle current traffic to switches that weren’t designed for the number of devices you have, or wireless access points that are creating dead zones, amongst other things.
This will be your baseline and will stop you from spending money solving the wrong problem.
Match Your Router to Your Traffic Load
Your router is the most consequential piece of hardware in the network. And it is often commonly underspecified.
Consumer-grade equipment gets installed because it is cheaper and familiar; however, it’s not able to handle the capacity in which you will be using it. This is why performance degrades as your headcount and device count grow.
Enterprise-grade MikroTik routers are designed to handle significantly higher throughput, more simultaneous connections, and more complex routing configurations compared to devices for home use only.
When you’re evaluating your options to upgrade your router, you want to look at certain specs, including throughput in real-world conditions, the number of concurrent sessions the device can handle, and whether it supports the VLANs and VPN configurations your network requires.
Built-in Room to Scale
If your network is built for your current size, it’s already too small. Your network needs to be set up for growth in headcount, devices, additional locations, and more cloud services, etc, before you need them. An infrastructure that is built for smaller-scale operations will start to struggle once you grow.
The key here, when you are building your network, is to have the capability for more than you need. So that when you grow, it’s ready to grow with you. This means buying hardware with headroom, structuring your IP addressing scheme to accommodate expansion from the start, and choosing equipment from vendors whose product lines scale upward so you’re not ripping things out when you need more capacity.
Lock Down Your Network
Security is easier to build and reinforce when it’s done right from the beginning. And the last thing you want is for everything you’ve worked hard for to be compromised due to one small oversight.
This is why a properly segmented network with separate VLANs for different functions, guest traffic, and IoT devices is essential. You need to keep everything separate in its own segments from the start. This limits the damage when one segment is compromised.
Your firewall rules should be restrictive by default, not permissive, and you need to have access granted deliberately, rather than open to everyone. The same goes for remote workers, too. You need correctly configured VPN access as soon as employees start to work from home or they come on board as remote workers.
Factor Ongoing Management
If you have a network that no one can manage, what you have is a liability. Before committing to any hardware, regardless of how good it is, you need to be honest about the internal expertise available to configure it and maintain it.
Some enterprise hardware offers flexibility but requires in-house experienced network engineers to get the best out of the system. And if that expertise isn’t available in-house, then you need to look at your options, which are a managed IT service or choosing options with a simpler management interface that trades some configurability for easier day-to-day operation.
Both approaches are viable, but you need to understand what you are able to access before committing to any type of hardware. Because it won’t manage itself, and assuming it will, will land you in trouble sooner rather than later.
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