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Why It’s Always Best To Know What Is Happening On Your Network

Whilst you might prefer to turn a blind eye and choose to believe (or hope!) that there are no issues, living in blissful ignorance isn’t always a good thing – particularly where business networks are concerned.

The network that connects all computers within a business is often one of the most crucial components in any modern company. With the Internet playing such a crucial role in day-to-day communication, research and revenue related activities, ensuring that your connection is secure and stable is just as important as taking care to avoid misuse of company time. If you fail to effectively track what’s happening within your network, you will never be able to solve any issues, through not understanding their root-cause.

For instance, what happens if an employee is spending hours on gambling sites or searching for jobs? This contravenes the rules within most workplaces and, if it was allowed to go unchecked, you could be significantly reducing the efficiency of the entire office.

Rather than overtly looking over employees’ shoulders as they work, it’s easy to track what sites people are visiting and the content that they’ve downloaded through network monitoring software. This provides you with detailed feedback on what all users are accessing and alert you to any potential issues or contraventions to your company’s rules.

By making all members of staff aware that their network activity is monitored, you can hopefully avoid any issues further down the line. This assumes of course that they take this seriously and will therefore avoid accessing sites that they know to be banned or against your guidelines. Of course you may still encounter issues, which can then be dealt with following usual disciplinary procedures.

The trouble with ignoring issues is that if they are allowed to continue, they can quickly escalate or become the norm. For instance, if a business has clearly stated that the use of social networking sites is prohibited but some staff still choose to access Facebook, others may soon copy. After a while, you could find that employees are wasting hours doing non-work activities, purely because they can. This is obviously an extreme example, but it also isn’t beyond the realms of possibility either.

When it comes to a business network, there are a number of potential issues to deal with beyond Internet access for staff. Security is certainly foremost of these concerns. With the volume of malware increasing, it is essential for any business to ensure that all data and other activities are secure. Again, network monitoring software can help prevent external attacks or accidental downloads that may cause substantial damage. It will also provide alerts, indicating the source, time and other details relating to the issue, allowing you to take appropriate action where required.

Efficiency is also another key feature of any good network. If your bandwidth is limited or you regularly suffer downtime, then the entire business will suffer as a consequence. Whether it’s an issue of location, on-site servers or providers, or being able to identify the times when the system slows, identifying any patterns could be vital to find an effective solution. Whilst this might cause inconvenience in the short-term, particularly if you have to chase or change your existing providers, it can have a number of long-term benefits when it comes to the efficiency of your office.

So if you want to keep an eye on what’s happening within your company’s network, it’s important that you have an effective piece of monitoring software. This will help to highlight issues and enable you to take action where required. Whether it’s an internal disciplinary issue, security alert or poor bandwidth, living in ignorance could cost your business.

By: Vincent A Rogers

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This article was produced by Vincent Rodgers, an author who writes for numerous tech businesses involved in network monitoring. If you're looking to purchase network monitoring software for your business, he recommends NetFort Technologies.

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