The San Joaquin County Superior Court was the target of a recent cyberattack that shut down most of its digital services and impacted about 800,000 residents. The breach disrupted critical services, including phone operations, e-filing platforms, and payment processing; the attack even led to jurors being excused from service. Remediation efforts are underway to investigate the incident and restore the network to normal operations.
The breach highlights the importance of network monitoring, whether you work for a municipality, corporation, or small business. Often, we think of network monitoring as a critical security measure to prevent cyberattacks. But, while network monitoring can indeed help your business identify and minimize potential intrusions, it also helps you reduce costly downtime and contributes to business growth.
In this post, we help you understand the role of network monitoring in sustaining your own operations and fostering business expansion, no matter your size or industry.
Understanding Network Monitoring
Many of us regularly see our doctor for routine exams to make sure our minds and bodies are heathy. Annual examinations can alert us to abnormalities and issues that should be further investigated and treated. Networking monitoring is similar—think of it as a health check for your business network, although it’s performed on a more frequent basis than an annual doctor’s appointment.
Networking monitoring provides visibility into your business’ technology environment to ensure everything is running at peak performance. It looks at metrics like traffic, bandwidth utilization, and uptime to help detect failures or anomalies. The results are typically delivered to your team via maps, insights, and reports. By regularly monitoring your business network, you can more effectively apply patches, troubleshoot, and maintain key devices and components such as desktops, servers, firewalls, switches, and routers.
With network monitoring, you’ll develop an understanding of your normal performance levels. Which means, when something unusual does occur, like a traffic bottleneck, you can identify the issue more quickly and determine if it poses a security or productivity threat to your business operations.
Network Monitoring and Business Continuity
Think about all the reasons your business could experience disruption or downtime: employee error, cyberattack, misconfigured software, hardware failures like defective equipment, natural disaster, a global pandemic. Most sources estimate the cost of downtime at more than $400 per minute for a small business—a cost you likely can’t afford. The concept of business continuity is your ability to maintain normal operations, or to quickly return to a normal state following an incident. Networking monitoring can enable greater business continuity in three key ways:
Identify problems before they escalate. Monitoring your network can alert you to suspicious activity and provide early warning. Threats are more easily contained when they’re detected in early stages, which reduces your potential downtime and the costs associated with recovery.
Greater visibility reduces unplanned downtime. Network monitoring gives your team a clear window into all the connected components and devices that form your business network. This helps you identify and triage issues that decrease performance and result in outages.
Ensure your network performance is aligned with your unique needs. Network monitoring ensures that the technology components you have in place are being used in an optimal way, including your staff time and resources.
Network Monitoring and Business Growth
When your business runs continually, without disruption, it positions your organization for growth and scale. Today, growth is undoubtedly connected to your business’ ability to adapt to technological and cultural shifts like automation and hybrid work. Network monitoring enables you to adapt to these shifts, while staying secure and productive. Networking monitoring contributes to business growth in several ways, including:
More efficient workflows. As a small business, you likely have limited technology resources, including your trained staff. With network monitoring, you can automate key aspects, including network reporting and analysis. This frees up your team to focus on less time-consuming and more business-critical tasks.
Adapt new and necessary technologies. At some point (if not already), your small business will likely shift some services to the cloud and adopt machine learning and AI tools that enable you to stay competitive and better serve your customers. Network monitoring helps you keep tabs on components that are critical but seem otherwise out of your control, like third-party cloud services.
Drive strategic planning and investment. The results and reports you receive from network monitoring can help you anticipate and allocate technology investments that enable business growth and support your strategic goals. Network monitoring provides key insights to help your team justify right-sized and forward-looking spending on technology, equipment, and staff resources.
We hope this post illuminates the myriad benefits of network monitoring for your small business. Network monitoring can protect your business from cyberthreats while ensuring business continuity and ushering in growth. We also know you’re busy running your business!
A great place to start is with our free Network Security Assessment and Audit. We organize a discovery session with your team to review your technology environment and uncover vulnerabilities in your network. At N8 Solutions, we also offer several levels of network monitoring to suit your business’s unique needs and budget. Please get in touch with us today to keep your business humming in the year ahead!