How to Optimise Your Business Connectivity

Speaking frankly, the need for connectivity is perhaps the one tool in a business’ arsenal that is most widely understood to be of extreme necessity in the digital age, while simultaneously being the least understood tool in and of itself. 

Oftentimes, this results in paying far too much for your business’ overall connectivity. Worse yet, you might be paying too much for connectivity that isn’t optimised to enable your business to operate efficiently, to grow, and to adapt to trends in the market. 

In truth, it’s no longer sufficient to operate with a conservative understanding and approach to the overall connectivity of your business if you hope to remain connected and relevant in the future.  

Thankfully, we’re here to help you understand how to optimise your business’ connectivity, but first, let’s remind ourselves why this is worth the bother in the first place. 

The Impact of Poorly Optimised Connectivity 

In modern business, poorly performing network connectivity is virtually impossible to ignore, given that almost everything relies on fast connections. We’d go so far as to say that few things kill productivity and damage employee morale faster than connection errors, unscheduled downtime, performance bottlenecks, and subsequent hindrances to customer service delivery.

Every minute of downtime can lead to missed opportunities and lost revenue, making the financial losses to your bottom line quite real. A reliable connection for you and your other users is clearly of the utmost importance, which is why it is vital to optimise your overall connectivity.

Here are our 5 network connectivity optimisation tips.

#1. Identify the disruptive spots

Your first step is to analyse the performance of your network connectivity to determine where there are disruptions. In our experience, this is typically found in two areas: speed and latency. 

Ideally, your network should afford sufficient speed so that your daily use isn’t disrupted, particularly when demand is at its highest. Another common disruptive performance metric is network latency, often referred to as lag, which is when there are delays in communication over your network connection, which causes disruptions to your connectivity.

These problems can be caused by a range of factors, such as the way your website is constructed or CPU cycles that are slow to respond in a reasonable timeframe, or even the environment in which your network is hosted, where the distance of your devices is too far from the servers.

#2. Exploring your infrastructure

Talking about the environment, a key area that should be optimised is your business’ network infrastructure. In order to help your business be as efficient as possible, especially if you are relying on your network as your primary point of contact for delivering products and services to your customers, is to consider a network redundancy system. 

Network redundancy is a duplicated infrastructure with additional network devices and lines of communication to protect you from downtime. Simply, if something in your connection fails, your business stays in business by relying on this additional network support in your infrastructure. 

Take a moment to really consider how important this is for the communication layer of your business operations. In a modern, digitally-driven economy, forward-thinking businesses like yours may already be using are cloud-based services and hosted voice (VoIP) to deliver the best to your customers. Without a network redundancy system, your connectivity may be compromised and your employees unable to engage with your customers. 

#3. Review your resource allocation

As most businesses have innovated and pursued the use of technology in order 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 their customers. 

To remain efficient in this environment it’s critical to perform quality of service checks to ensure that bandwidth is reserved for critical or high-intensity applications or services, which can then can work efficiently even when network resources are strained. 

In our experience, a system can be optimised to include the addition of management software that prioritise and allocate bandwidth allowance, imposing upload and download speed limits on non-essential applications.

#4. Proactively remove malware

This isn’t just about the security risks that you could face as a result of malware, the costs of which can be severe. Malware also has the potential to drag your network performance down significantly. Depending on the nature of the threat, malware can linger on your network for a long time before it strikes, affecting performance. It’s therefore imperative that you proactively hunt down and stomp out malware from your system. 

#5. Intelligent design

Our final tip on optimising connectivity is to design your connectivity network around your actual needs and not what you think you need. This requires working with experts, like the team at Huge Connect, to build a network that caters for what your business needs now and is able to scale for the future. Without this kind of intuitive design, you may find that your network takes on a bloated, Frankenstein architectural style as your needs change over time. 

This is one of the reasons why we conduct a network needs-analysis with our clients, to help them understand what they need and why. We know all too well just how difficult it is to manage something that you don’t understand and we hope that this post has shed much needed light on how your connectivity can be optimised to ensure maximum efficiency, and therefore be worth what you’re paying in order to stay connected.

Connect with us today and let us help you explore the best connectivity solution for your business.