26 Jun 2018
Is Your Company's Network Growing?
Growth is almost always a good sign, but a larger pool of customers often means you need a larger infrastructure. More employees, updated equipment, and a larger network are all expenses commonly associated with a growing business. Usually, the changes happen organically and sporadically: a new employee one month, bumping your third-party service subscriptions from one level to the next, or adding a new router in your office. But make sure you have systems in place to monitor that growing network because:
Custom code doesn't scale.
If your company uses projections, models, and other computing tasks that use a lot of processing power, you probably have an HPC cluster. But as you add more nodes, or as you add more and more processing power to keep up with demand, the custom tweaks an employee may have made years ago will start to crumble. Any internally-created databases, custom scripts, or older IT monitoring programs that have lingered in your systems from years ago can crash if your cluster grows too big. It can be impossible to find the underlying cause unless you have software keeping an eye on the whole system or your legacy employees remember the old code. Managed IT support can find those vulnerabilities and switch your business to standardized software.
A patchwork of different hardware is vulnerable to attack.
The last time you updated your virus protection on your personal computer or it had an automated update, your computer got stronger. Operating system companies and program providers are always building patches and new layers of security to fix previous problems or holes that new hacking techniques can take advantage of. The more variegated your technology is, the harder it is to make sure everything is operating at the same level. Managed IT support services can monitor the network as a whole for problems before any develop. Their monitoring software can also test for incompatible protections and variations in strength so an older piece of hardware can't threaten the rest.
Your company's growth is a good thing. But unmanaged growth can be dangerous. Go to folio1's blog here to see if all of your company's systems are securely up to snuff.