Network monitoring isn’t a sole luxury of large enterprises. Even small businesses can adopt network monitoring services which will prove worth the investment because in the long run, keeping your network monitored 24/7 drives issues, downtime and even hackers at bay.
For instance, downtime is worth $5,600 per minute according to a recent research by Ponemon Institute. And for every 10 small business, 6 won’t recover from a cyberattack as per the U.S’ National Cyber Security Alliance. Clearly, your business could easily suffer the devastation of cyber-attack and downtime if your IT infrastructure is left out in the open without necessary monitoring. That being said, here are some of the many reasons why you should invest in a network monitoring service.
Protects Your Network Against Cyber Criminals
Small businesses are the number one target for cyber criminals and are an eye candy for ransomware attacks because they are less likely equipped to protect their network and more likely to pay ransom. It is no surprise then, that more than half (52.4%) of spear phishing attack victims in 2015 were small to medium businesses.
One of the heaviest burdens of small businesses is the cost of investing in technologies that will protect their network and data. But the good news is that network monitoring software is an affordable alternative to the oft-expensive intrusion detection system (ISD). Network monitoring dashboard can quickly give you a glance on the performance status of your network and each device connected. This greater visibility enables you to identify suspicious traffic or anomalous behavior on each device and thereby take action before anything escalates to a problem.
In short, network monitoring solution gives you greater visibility on your network and leaves no gap on which an intrusion may happen.
Best for No to Small IT Team
Hiring new employees is costly. From the man hunting to giving training and offering salary, it is never easy for small business to grow its team. But with a good network monitoring service, you can relieve yourself of headache caused by having an undermanned IT department. Network monitoring works full time 24/7 to give you updates on the performance and health of your network without the need of full time employee to operate it. With this, you can make sure your network and service safely run in full swing without crowding your office with a bunch of IT guys.
Therefore, network monitoring is perfect for small businesses with a very small team of IT professionals as it works unmanned, and only notifies you when something anomalous is happening.
Maps Your IT Infrastructure for Greater Control and Visibility.
At the very basic level, network monitoring enables you to document the scope and extent of your network. If you don’t employ network monitoring service, the inventory of your network is certainly tedious and resource-demanding. And worse, doing it manually taxes on your IT team’s efficiency. But with the right network monitoring service, it can map your IT infrastructure and give you an inventory of devices in your network. This gives you the visibility you need to control, protect and scale your network.
Keeps Your Business Ahead of the Curve
Having your infrastructure mapped out would give you the visibility to identify areas you need to work on to achieve greater efficiency and the issues that has to be addressed for the moment. At this point you can also get notification on which device or hardware needs an update so you can keep your network at its best shape.
With greater visibility, network monitoring also enables you to see trends overtime and thereby plan out the growth of your network bandwidth capacity. This capability, to scale your network’s growth is crucial if you expect your small business to grow and adopt newer technologies and trends like BYOD (bring your own device).
Keep Your BYOD Policy Safe.
We are presently in a mobile revolution, where mobility and accessibility are the key features we look for a technology. And thanks to a great wave of cloud migration, many enterprises and organizations are adopting this mobility at work, enabling employees to bring their devices and fetch data & files in the cloud. This, we call BYOD (bring your own device).
Younger generations love this work setup, as it gives them the luxury to use their own devices. However, it immediately eats up the bandwidth which may slow down critical business applications. It also poses security threat to an enterprise’s network because it widens the points of entry which makes intrusion easy for attackers. But by monitoring your network, you can easily solve your bandwidth problem and maintain maximum security against attacks.
About the author:
Darrell Smith is a data / cybersecurity news junkie. He spends most of his time surfing the web for the latest data and network operations center trends. He also shares his recent findings through his articles and other blog posts.
