If you count up the number of business activities that don’t in some way depend on technology, you’d probably end up with a rather short list.

Even in traditional industries, like farming and aged care, we’re seeing IT used in new and wonderful ways. Dairy cows are monitored to improve health and milk yield, nurses are able to check medical notes at the bedside, and crops are checked using drones. These developments have one thing in common: they all require a network connection.
Even if your own business activities are less newsworthy than herds of connected heifers, the need for fast, dependable network connections will be just as clear. Just as the right networking technology makes the amazing possible, poor connectivity hampers workplace productivity and can carry a heavy cost.

Visibility

A simple truth in IT is that if you can’t see what is going on, you can’t tell where a problem lies. This is often the biggest challenge in unravelling connectivity problems. As a result, when the sales team struggles to access an essential app, or the CEO finds it to be painfully slow to check emails overnight, the answer has often been to either put up with the problem or to throw money at it. Neither is satisfactory for long.

This is one of the challenges that vendors have been wrestling with in recent years, and we’re now seeing the results of major investment in research and development. Leading the pack, Aruba has introduced network management that gives granular visibility into users, devices and apps. In other words, the network manager can identify who uses which apps when, and can prioritise certain apps such as Office 365 over others, such as Instagram. They can also gain a clear view of the mobile user experience, which means pinpointing exactly where the sales team’s frustrations are caused and fixing it, so they can focus on closing deals without battling to upload them onto the database.

Predictive Insight

Because connectivity is involved in just about every aspect of business, the network encounters immense amounts of data and here, too, the Aruba researchers saw an opportunity that is now bearing fruit. Using artificial intelligence (AI), the network can now gather knowledge. The more data it encounters, the more intelligent it becomes. This intelligence is used to derive predictive insight, so that the network can tell when a potential problem will occur and rectify it automatically in most cases.

Aside from putting a stop to those 3 a.m. emergencies that every network manager dreads, the self-healing network drastically reduces administration needed, so that skilled time is freed up for efficiency or revenue-building tasks. It also bolsters security in a time when every organisation is a target.

Cloud-Based Network Management

The final big development in networks is cloud-based management. Anything from small tweaks and monitoring to major actions can be performed from any device with a browser. Checking in from the train or progressing a project while working from home is easy, and helps to keep the business at peak efficiency.

If almost every aspect of business is connected, it is safe to say that business health and performance depends heavily on network health and performance. There is no longer any need to spend valuable time and money on wrestling with cumbersome, dated technology. From user motivation and productivity to voice, video and customer interactions, modern networks give organisations the opportunity to thrive.

Time to give your business a performance boost? Contact our friendly networking experts today.