In my last post, I wrote about the crucial role network services play in underpinning cloud and managed services — and notably in enabling your technology services provider to wield a mix of customizable services they can tailor specifically to your business’s needs.
The right technology services provider knows networks
Of course, the right provider has solid vendor relationships and familiarity with leading-edge technologies and products.
The right provider also has the skills and experience to understand your business goals, assess the gaps between where you are technologically and where you need to be to achieve those goals, and craft customizable services into solution options you can afford.
Oftentimes, these options involve improving the condition of your existing on-premise network . This is especially likely if you’ve been adding upfront capability — cloud-based apps, virtualized servers, mobility — without shoring up the supporting network.
This is why finding a technology services provider with a deep competence in network services — so they can take care of your network as well as their own — matters so much.
Starting with a network health and infrastructure assessment
Here at Quest, we do a comprehensive network and infrastructure assessment that gives you the information you need to understand the best ways to get your network up to par and keep it that way.
Even a glance at what this assessment does gives you a sense of how critical your network is to all else — and how costly it can be to let its performance corrode. Our assessment:
- Diagrams your network and inventories its components;
- Estimates end-of-service/life of software/devices;
- Maps cloud dependencies;
- Tracks metrics like CPU and Windows Server memory utilization
- Identifies performance bottlenecks; and
- Conducts network traffic simulations so you can evaluate your environment’s readiness.
We’ve set up this network and infrastructure assessment so you can use data from an initial run to take corrective action on the assessment’s technology performance metrics, then re-measure by repeating the entire assessment process.
Taking care of your network
Once you know where your issues lie, you can work with a deep-competence technology services provider to enable your network to support your business goals . At the very least, look for a provider offering customizable services that:
- Proactively monitor on-site and/or remote network performance across complex environments to track network activity and detect anomalies;
- Conduct fault prevention that uncovers performance issues and responds before an outage;
- Monitor applications to optimize visibility, control, and reliably delivery to users;
- Offer service level management to identify and fix potential disruptions;
- Do capacity planning to understand usage patterns and trends; and
- Enable custom reporting to gather the statistical, logging, and graphical data you need to analyze the patterns, activities, and potential vulnerabilities.
