Tips for Improving Network Speed and Efficiency


Companies in today’s global business world need their networks to be functional almost 100 percent of the time. When they aren’t, it costs, eg, employee productivity, lost leads, lost sales, etc.

To keep your network operating at peak performance, following are some tips for improving its speed and efficiency.

 

Educate Users:

The demand users put on a network can significantly hamper its performance. And, today’s network users have more tools, applications and functions at their fingertips than ever before. There’s streaming media, file sharing, P2P applications, etc. All of this taxes a system’s performance.

Educating users on how to use the system more effectively can dramatically improve its speed and efficiency. For example, advising employees to use a shared drive for resource-hogging files like PowerPoint presentations instead of emailing them to all relevant parties.

This simple measure – and others like it -- can dramatically decrease the toll on a network, increasing its speed and efficiency.

Many users are simply unaware of how their usage slows down a network. Once they realize it, they are much better equipped to become “team players” in helping to improve network performance.

Install Protective Mechanisms:

Junk traffic (ie, spam) is perhaps one of the biggest contributors to a network’s poor performance. Installing protective mechanisms like antivirus software, firewalls and spam filters help to prevent a lot of it.

Note: It’s important to keep network protectors like these up to date. New viruses and aggressive spammers are always popping up. What didn’t get through one day may very well get through the next if your system’s defenders are not current.

Update Your Network:

Networks are not static entities; they are mercurial depending on your organization’s needs, growth, employee usage patterns and a host of other factors.
When actions like new applications are added, employee traffic patterns change and new security measures are implemented, this puts a different type of demand on the network.

As an example, if an organization finds that its mobile workforce has increased over the last few years, they may want to centralize servers to improve performance. The old network, set up to serve a more stationary workforce may no longer fits their needs.

Analyze Network Usage:

This is perhaps the most obvious step in improving network speed and efficiency.

Understanding particulars like its traffic patterns, infrastructure and application-based performance metrics, for example, will help to diagnose problems quicker when they arise – and arrive at a solution faster.

Tools to Help with Network Speed and Reliability"

Here are a few tools you might want to consider to help with the issues outlined above.