When it comes to keeping your IT network performing optimally, finding and fixing network faults certainly is crucial. But it’s just as crucial to sustain network operations while the issue gets resolved. 

Which means that the first order of business is to ensure that your network has entered one of the failure modes you’ve designed for it so that remaining network resources are allocated according to your organization’s business priorities.

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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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Our Chief Technical Officer, Mike Dillon, estimates that the number of infected sites is growing by 20% to 25% a year. “If your company is shifting more toward cloud services and hasn’t addressed security, you will be attacked,” he says.

So here are the (non-technical) questions you need to ask and get answered to protect your business:

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There are times when it’s best to just let someone else do the talking:

“Quest was instrumental in helping us move to a virtualized environment,” says Bob Fuller of Navellier & Associates, a Reno, NV-based financial investment company. 

To date, the firm uses 28 fewer servers than before.

“We told Quest what we needed and they helped us every step of the way, from design to providing the hardware and engineering expertise and completing the migration. Quest was the key to our success.”

“Every twenty-four hours, our virtual servers get replicated to mass storage devices at Quest’s Network Operations Center. Without virtualization, we’d have to rent space for three racks of servers, install those, and somehow replicate the information and data every day. That would be a pretty pricey thing to do.”

Plus Navellier can continue to service customers during a disaster.

“In the event of a total service outage, Navellier could lose $20,000 every thirty minutes – a number that would skyrocket if we were unable to perform an important trade,” says Bob. “But thanks to the way Navellier’s backup is designed, it’s not a big deal to get our systems turned on and working at Quest’s Network Operations Center.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Thanks, Bob.

Cloud computing has a lot of promise, but unless it’s matched to your business needs, it also has a number of pitfalls.  Quest is committed to guiding you through your decision process and helping you transition to the Cloud. That’s why you need to start your journey with a Cloud Feasibility Assessment to:

• Identify which IT capabilities you might think of offloading to the Cloud
• Determine what sort of service availability is necessary for your business
• Determine what level of security, privacy and compliance mandates must you meet 

If you’re attending Cisco Live! 2011, Cisco’s annual IT and communications conference, come by and chat with us about your Cloud plans and ask about Quest’s free Cloud Strategy Assessment. We’ll be at Booth 1691 in the Cisco Cloud Pavillion on the show floor.

We’ll also be presenting “The Cloud Built Your Way” 6:30 pm on Tuesday, July 12 and 12:40 pm on Wednesday, July 13, in the Cloud Pavilion Theater just behind our booth.  

During the presentation, we’ll show you that there are providers who can and will accommodate your IT needs and business objectives as well as help you transition to the Cloud. You might win one of the ten $50 Mandalay Bay casino chips we’ll be giving away at each presentation.

So, drop by Booth 1691 at the Cisco Cloud Pavilion and let us help you figure out how Cloud can happen for you and what you need to get it done.

Security requires more than software. It demands ongoing attention. Without that attention, your business faces constant risk of loss.

To figure out if your business’ security is getting appropriate attention, I offer you four simple questions to ask your IT security folks. Their response will tell you a lot about how safe your business really is.

1. When was the last time you think we were attacked?
2. If we do get breached, how will you know where the hackers got in?
3. Who’s responsible, from a security perspective, for monitoring all the logs generated from our devices?
4. How often do we do a vulnerability assessment?

If you get vague answers or outright I-don’t-knows, your security plan needs work. Right now.

And if you’re worried about security conversations becoming too technical, remember this: Security is as much an operational concern as a technical one. For example, determining if someone could download your entire customer database to a thumb drive and walk out the door requires a security conversation.

A trusted advisor can help you translate your real-world concerns into an actionable plan to protect your business.

Real-time traffic, streaming traffic, bulk traffic, transactional traffic, and web content are the reasons your network is being asked to work harder than ever. Delivering these services to users, however, requires not only bandwidth, it requires the network itself to have the capability to determine how to accommodate the flow of that traffic.

Why? Because not all traffic is equal. Just as a speeding ambulance has priority in a sea of traffic on the highway, your business’ time-sensitive and mission-critical applications should have right-of-way.

Traditionally, the method used to accommodate network traffic can best be described as first-come, first-served: whatever bandwidth the application needs it gets, no matter what the repercussions. The result is delays, congestion, packet-dropping, jitter, unhappy users, and frazzled network managers.

The good news is that technologies such as quality-of-service (QoS) are available to help provide better service for network traffic by managing bandwidth allocations. With QoS, realtime and high-priority applications are handled differently than lower priority data applications. And QoS can also help limit the amount of undesirable traffic, including security threats.

If your business is now or will be utilizing any of the rich network applications available—voice-over-IP (VoIP) or videoconferencing, for example — you’ll want to think about where QoS fits into your plans.

It’s rush hour. Everyone is trying to jam onto the highway all at once. You sit wasting time, frustrated. But you’re not in a car — you’re at your desk. And the traffic backup is from a data and information bottleneck on your business highway — your network.

Although network performance affects the productivity of critical business operations, like our highway infrastructure, networks tend to receive attention only when something ‘bad’ happens. Regular maintenance and monitoring are back burner items for overworked IT departments pushed to install the latest application. It’s a combination destined to create trouble, usually in the form of a bandwidth issue.

The bandwidth jam
Because network usage is an evolving thing, the number of users and the type of usage changes minute to minute, with new services constantly added. Too often these changes to band-width demand are made without any regard to band-width availability. And there you are, sitting at your computer waiting, waiting, waiting. Or worse, crashing.

What to do? Don’t panic-buy. Businesses often rush to purchase new equipment when all they really need is to better use what they already have.

Network monitoring and maintenance are key. And it’s easy to make them part of your IT team’s best practices by seeking help from an experienced networking partner.