What Is Network Management?
As with automobile, household, and facility maintenance network systems require a little extra assistance to avoid problems. While there are some preventative maintenance tasks you can perform on your own to minimize network downtime, you may find that you need to pair your efforts with those of the experts to keep your operations running smoothly on a daily basis.
Well-maintained networks encounter fewer problems and are much easier to troubleshoot than those left without consistent upkeep. To ensure that you do not find yourself running with faulty settings, risking damage to both software and hardware over time, you will need to clean up your network regularly. That is where network management comes in, and it is often most effective through a comprehensive third-party service platform, like our network maintenance plan. Network-MGT is a third-party maintenance provider that offers a range of services including network monitoring, server maintenance, and data storage maintenance.
At its core, network maintenance consists of all tasks and systems in place to monitor, update and run your organization’s computer network before problems strike. This “network” by itself involves your entire portfolio of physical IT assets, including desktops, phones and servers and non-physical IT assets, such as software and cloud access. When grouped together, each represents your IT ecosystem. Like other business functions, a healthy IT ecosystem relies on proactive, daily activities and strategic foresight rather than reactive adjustments or ad-hoc, spur-of-the-moment patches.
These are the basic tenets of maintaining your network and the basis of a successful regular network maintenance plan, which typically include the following:
- Network cybersecurity: Implementing robust and up-to-date network defense layers, such as traffic-managing firewalls, virtual private networks, user access controls, double authentication measures, log inspections for usage documentation, real-time breach notifications and auto-generated security reports.
- Network performance: Analyzing top network performance concerns influencing the speed and reliability of your devices, including bandwidth usage, traffic patterns, bottlenecks, frequently down or crashed servers, connection lags, delays and more.
- Network scalability: Ensuring proper software and hardware systems fitting your current operations, number of network users, endpoint locations and businesses functions.
- Regular hardware and software updates: Scheduling updates prorated across network components and interfaces, which in turn bolsters both a network’s overall performance and security defenses.
- IT infrastructure compliance: Maintaining internal compliance with company practices as well as external government regulations and industry policies.
- Preemptive network repairs: Using auto-generated reports and analytics to spot and patch usage problems across the IT ecosystem — or at the very least troubleshooting them — before they turn existential.