Speed Alone Isn’t Enough For Your Business Connectivity
There has been a surge in businesses and employees around the world working remotely over the past two years as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. What started as a trend out of necessity, looks like it may be here to stay. Sure, there are some industries where this isn’t possible due to the nature of work and there will still be some companies who prefer to have their employees in the office where their time and output can be managed in a more hands-on manner. But it would appear that the pendulum is swinging and remote business operations are becoming the norm.
There’s a lot that goes into operating remotely and one of the vital aspects that must be prioritised in order to establish a strong business is your network connectivity. Not just the speed of your connectivity, which is mistakenly what business owners focus on. In reality, there’s a lot more to setting up a capable business connection than just its speed efficiencies.
What this blogs aims to do is unpack the additional aspects of connectivity that are important for your business, such as redundancy, latency, and of course, both the physical security and logical security of your network connectivity.
Is Speed Not Important?
Let’s be clear, the speed of your connectivity is important. It’s a significant aspect that should be considered. As a business owner, you need sufficient speed so that your daily use isn’t disrupted, even when demand is at its highest. For this reason, many entrepreneurs consider speed the most important factor. It’s understandable, because why wouldn’t you want the fastest internet connection you can get? Just make sure that speed isn’t the only consideration when reviewing your business connectivity requirements.
The other factors we’ll look at are:
- The truth about network redundancy
- The latest on latency
- Security for you, security for your customers
- Agility and flexibility
The Truth About Network Redundancy
The number of businesses relying on their networks as their primary point of contact for delivering products and services to their customers is growing. Additionally, most businesses will soon, if they aren’t already, accessing corporate and cloud resources via their networks in order to operate. A reliable connection for you and your other users is clearly of the utmost importance and an outage could be catastrophic. Every minute of downtime can lead to missed opportunities and lost revenue, making the financial losses to your bottom line quite real.
That’s why it’s necessary to consider a network redundancy system as part of your business connectivity strategy. Network redundancy sounds complex, but really, it’s a duplicated infrastructure with additional network devices and lines of communication to protect you from downtime. This way, if something in your connection fails, your business stays online.
The Latest on Latency
The way we conduct business in this new, tech-driven environment suggests that a seamless operation is within reach, however technology isn’t without its obstacles. All that seems seamless can be interrupted by network latency. Frequently called lag, both these terms simply describe delays in communication over a network connection. The kind that causes disruptions to any business activity that requires a network connection.
You get two main types of delays that can cause disruptions to your daily online operations. The first is zero to low-latency which results in very small delays and is preferred. The other is called high-latency, which describes longer delays that can cause mayhem. These problems can be caused by factors like the distance of your devices from the servers, the way your website is constructed, the user’s device having low memory or CPU cycles slow to respond in a reasonable timeframe, and issues with the physical components that move data from one point to the next.
Network latency can severely impede clear communication and affect your user experience, so it’s important to prioritise checks and balances to monitor this aspect of your business connectivity.
Security For You, Security For Your Customers
There’s no business in this day and age that doesn’t create, store, share or receive data of some kind. Unfortunately, network security breaches have become normal and can be expensive to deal with. That’s why it’s so important for you as a business owner to do what you can to secure your network connection, safeguard your data, and build more impenetrable protection against hackers and viruses.
The alternative is to risk the data that your business stores and uses falling into the wrong hands as a result of breach. The consequences include reputational damage, loss of customers, lawsuits, and job losses among other costs. Ultimately, it could mean the end of your business, depending on the size of the breach and the kind of data that you store and use.
8 Tips to secure your network connection:
- Use reliable, encrypted protocol for passwords on business network routers.
- Always disable or remove drives and other connecting external drives.
- Disable file sharing so file sharing is enabled only on file servers.
- Use data encryption to combat hackers.
- Set permissions to restrict access to sensitive information from unauthorised users.
- Set up security protocols to lock server rooms/devices that contain sensitive information.
- Use SSL certificates that allows an encrypted link between a browser and a Web server.
- Use data erasure to get rid of data that’s no longer relevant.
Agility and Flexibility
The past two years have been like no other and one of the most notable consequences, particularly in the economic space, is that most businesses have innovated and adapted through the use of technology in order to do things differently and survive. To be effective and successful, they have implemented new tools and protocols, started managing their operations remotely, offloaded applications to the cloud, and employed countless other activities to serve customers in this new world.
As businesses continue or indeed accelerate their digital transformation and cloud adoption to operate in a post-pandemic world, there’s a greater need for a network connection that provides agility and flexibility. The kind of flexibility that allows your business to adapt and become resilient in the face of challenges.
Huge Connect Can Help
Businesses will need to continue to rely on technology to innovate, improve, and compete in an ever-digitising space. More than that, the trend of remote working set by the Covid-19 pandemic will continue to impact how businesses operate long into the future. It comes as no surprise that your business’ connectivity is a pivotal element for business resilience and growth during this time.
Hopefully, this article will shed some light on the various factors that should play a role in the decision you make around setting up a secure, fast, and reliable business network connection. That said, it can still be challenging to navigate these important factors on your own.
Huge Connect continues to provide unfailing support and dependable Internet solutions and business connectivity for businesses of all sizes and from all industries across South Africa.
Connect with us today and let us help you explore the best connectivity solution for your business.
