Today, more people are staying at home to work remotely and shop online, rather than going to physical offices or shops. That means your remote workforce and customers are putting more stress on your network. Soon, the health of your business will depend on your network’s ability to handle this surge in traffic. Slow response times or, worse, system crashes, will cost you in employee productivity and business revenues. It’s important to have the network bandwidth to handle this influx. In this post, we review the questions you should ask of your current network.

Do you have the network bandwidth to handle the rise in traffic?
Determining how much network bandwidth you might need depends on multiple factors. One is the number of workers and customers who will access the network. Another is what applications they’ll use and what type of content and transactions will travel over the network. To ensure that your customers and employees will be able to successfully access your web site and work applications, you’ll need to ask some questions about your network and your network provider. Following are four key questions to evaluate your preparedness.

Is your service provider prepared to significantly increase your network bandwidth?
The first step is to ask your service provider about its capability to quickly scale up your bandwidth. With so many companies moving to work-from-home models, some providers are struggling to meet the demand.

Providers with multiple connections to other network providers can offer more consistently high quality performance. The more direct, or on-net, connections, the better the service. Many TierPoint data centers, for example, have five or more on-net providers to ensure there are alternate routes for traffic and give you more choice in network services. For instance, if your web site or employees handle videos or other large files, you may want content delivery network (CDN) services. CDNs serve as content proxies at the edge of networks to enable content to be closer to the customer, reducing bandwidth and increase responsiveness.

Whitelabel ITSolutions staff have substantial knowledge of network design, planning, and service options. Contact us to learn about improving your network performance and positioning your business to scale.