Even before you automate your network performance monitoring and management, you’ll need to do some planning. If you don’t have experts on hand, consider bringing in a reliable, dependable network advisor to help you:

1. Establish a performance baseline
   Planning involves establishing baseline performance thresholds — called quality-of-service (QoS) rules — using historical data, estimates of how existing services will grow, and anticipated demand for new services.
   
   To determine if your plan is working, you’ll need to measure current network behavior. Such metrics include the traffic generated at certain interface points and the load levels of trunks and devices.
   
   This is how network administrators monitor and manage network conditions. When conditions are out of whack, an alert is generated.
   
   These alerts can indicate an emerging issue, such as a need for additional resources, or a serious problem, such as load levels so high that network and/or application performance has been impacted.

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One of the greatest threats to your company’s productivity comes from poor IT network performance. Yet it can be tough to maintain a healthy network in the face of cost constraints, changes to your business, and constantly evolving technologies.

Which can put you between a rock and a hard place, because when it comes to your organization’s IT network, what you need — regardless of whether you’ve undertaken virtualization or cloud computing or unified communications — is a stable framework for delivering communication, applications, and services that provide a consistent, reliable experience under normal conditions.

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For quite some time, small and midsized businesses dared to feel safe from most malicious attacks — thanks to their relative smallness. Over the last couple of years, that’s been changing, because larger firms are tightening defenses and, as I’ve said before, the bad guys exploit opportunity.

Which is why shoddy IT security is a wide open opportunity for hackers to rip you off. 

So I’m finishing our list with two elements easily overlooked as you face the hassles of keeping up with criminal creativity.

#9 Educate your employees about security

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Did I mention that when it comes to IT security and defense in depth, the more layers the better?

One of the weakest points in many organizations is #7 on our list:

#7 Authenticate

You need to think in terms of both user authentication and information authentication. When it comes to user authentication, before allowing users access to your data, apps, systems, or networks authenticate them with at least two factors (something they know, something they are, something they have). Also …

• Make sure passwords are unique. The same password should not be shared among users nor used on different systems.
• CHANGE DEFAULT CREDENTIALS!  When your system/network admins deploy a new system or service, change the password.
• Consider using an identity/access management system with single sign-on capability to reduce the complexity, risk, and cost of managing employee authentication and access.

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It’s a new year, that moment for both reflection on the year gone by and anticipation of the year just begun. I’m guessing the last thing you want to think about is IT security — but after last year, referred to by some as The Year of the Hack, by others as The Year of the Data Breach, IT security is something you simply can’t afford to ignore.

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Anybody seeking to overcome the limits of traditional IT environments and streamline their business has to consider one of the most significant paradigm shifts of our time — cloud computing.

But take note: Cloud computing takes planning, because each move to the cloud is unique.

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A service-level agreement works best when it’s the result of a collaborative effort between you and a service provider you can trust. This kind of trusted collaboration will uncover the most cost-effective ways your provider’s IT capabilities can be put to work for your business.

Part of that trust involves the fifth and last Essential SLA Element on my list: Procedures for the safe and prompt return of your data upon service termination.

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A good service-level agreement looks simple — but that’s because it’s been conscientiously negotiated to meet the buyer’s needs. Of the five essential SLA elements that every managed and cloud services customer should focus on, I’ve described two — specifying service functionality and describing the infrastructure and standards to be maintained by the provider.

Essential SLA Elements #3 concerns SLA changes. Your SLA should include a mechanism by which you can regularly tune it in response to changing business conditions or new technologies. You’ll benefit from building in a formal review of your SLA (at least annually) in order to use experience and new information to revise it.

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