Few things are worse for a site, app, or business than a network going down. Whether you know about it right away, or need to wait for a complaint, downtime can be horrible. Not only can it stop productivity in its tracks, but can also lead to the development of bad reputation. Worse yet, IT downtime can potentially cost your company millions of dollars.
One of the best ways to prevent (or at least limit) network downtime is to perform network monitoring. Network monitoring is exactly what it sounds like, monitoring your networks to ensure they are functional and healthy. However, trying to do this manually will be a very tough task. Network monitoring tools can do the hard work for you. This article is going to look at several benefits that these types of tools can often provide.
To Quickly Identify and Address Security Issues
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If security isn’t at (or near) the top of your list when it comes to business or website concerns, it should be. While more business and work being done online is great for efficiency and collaboration, it also presents additional security risks. Data breaches and hacks are on the rise and no matter how large or small you are, you could be a target.
As you could imagine, a single hack or data breach could spell the end of your company. In seconds you could go from success to having to close your doors. While using a full-fledged intrusion detection software might work better for some companies, it can be quite expensive. A network monitoring tool will help you see if anything abnormal or out of the ordinary is happening within your infrastructure.
This could be a rise in traffic, unauthorized devices requesting access or numerous failed login attempts. Once you notice this issue or are alerted of it, you can take steps to prevent or respond to the issue. Without anything in place, you would be none the wiser that these events were even taking place.
To Better Prevent Outages
As mentioned in the introduction, downtime and other outages are huge problems for businesses and websites everywhere. These can cost companies a ton of money, though the exact amount will vary depending on the size of your operation. Thankfully, network monitoring tools can help you prevent or reduce outages with ease.
When your network is being monitored (especially automatically), you will be one step ahead of any outages. As soon as an error or particular event that could lead to an outage occurs, you will be notified. Not only will you be able to stop or quickly fix the outage, but you will have a better understanding of where and why it happened.
To Manage Growth
While everyone wants their business or website to grow, this growth isn’t always easy. Scaling is difficult and if done incorrectly can severely overload your network or infrastructure. This can lead to very unpleasant user experience, as the network simply isn’t prepared for the growth you are experiencing.
Monitoring your network can help identify the areas that need a little bit of work before you begin to scale. As networks continue to become more complex, it becomes more and more important to have flexibility and reliability, to be able to deal with the constant change. Simply put, it will be hard for your site or company to scale or grow in the right way without knowing the types of information that network monitoring can provide.
Hopefully, this article has been able to show you some of the many benefits of utilizing network monitoring tools.