Your business is running the most amazing way. Your team is connected, data is flowing, and suddenly a server crash happens. Probably a cyberattack. What happens next?
Here’s where network management comes into the picture. It helps with business continuity and quick disaster recovery, let’s understand how!
Why is network management now not optional?
Businesses these days rely extremely on networks. One link fails, and everything running in the company fails. It has now become a strategic necessity. It keeps businesses running – from emails and databases to cloud platforms and video calls, everything stays in check as per Slurp’it.
What exactly is network management?
This covers the following:
● Monitoring the complete network performance
● Checking and resolving issues quickly
● Managing the complete bandwidth and checking out device configurations
● Protecting the network from cyber threats
But when things go wrong, and obviously it can at any hour of the day, network management becomes a lot more important.
Now, before we get into the details let’s first understand what’s the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery?
● Business continuity is the ability of a business to keep critical functions running during disruptions, that may happen as per Slurp’it.
● Disaster recovery is how a businesses can quickly recover systems and data after any crisis comes in as per Slurp’it.
For example,
There is this mid-sized commerce company in Mumbai. They actually experienced a very massive server outage due to some regional power grid failure. Customer service really got hampered a lot. What saved them?
A good network management system. The NMS actually helped them to reroute the traffic to a backup data center in Delhi within minutes. And that’s how it saved them a lot!
What actually are the three pillars of network management in BC and DR?
To truly understand how it works, there are three pillars we need to walk through to get the whole structure together:
Network Monitoring
Network monitoring is like having CCTVs near and around your digital environment. Over here tools like PRTG, SolarWinds, and open source platforms can be of great help, these tools actually help with:
● Checking bottlenecks before anything explodes
● Get alerts on unusual activities, if there is any
● Monitor the complete uptime and latency
Automation and Configuration Management
Network automation really helps a lot during crises. Whether it’s deploying new firewall rules, rerouting traffic, or probably spinning up backup servers. Configuration management actually helps with:
● Standardizing the settings of all the devices
● Backups of all the network devices are quite up to date
● Restoration is a bit smooth and consistent
This way, if any router dies or a switch malfunctions, the team can recover it all within minutes, and not hours.
Network Security
Next up comes security policies. Cyber threats is one of the biggest causes of network related disasters. And that’s where policies, intrusion detection systems, encrypted backups are like the literal non negotiables as per Slurp’it.
How network management supports business continuity?
It helps businesses to stay up even in the critical times. NMS actually helps businesses with
● Fraud detection and isolation
● Load balancing and failover mechanisms (allow systems to switch automatically in case of any failure that may happen)
● Proper bandwidth management (allows business to throttle, allocate, and optimize the complete bandwidth).
How network management helps with disaster recovery?
If any issues comes in, the point is how quickly can they record. It helps here with:
● Rapid restoration of network services
● Cloud integration for data redundancy
● Historical logs for root cause analysis.
Small business? Still network management matters!
You might really be thinking that small businesses don’t really need any NMS. But you do need it. In fact, small businesses often suffer more from downtime. A managed network might be a big investment, but the cost would be way more higher. But there are other more tools available – like Zabbix, OpenNMS, or ManageEngine OpManager.
If there’s one good thing you can do to your business, don’t just hope, keep yourself prepared. It is simply the blueprint of complete preparation. It helps you serve customers better, operate and recover quickly. So, what are you waiting for? Try NMS right away! For more information, contact us at Slurp’it!
