Just because a system is designed by humans doesn’t mean it’s understood by humans. When it comes to networks, there’s a lack of visibility that makes it harder to recognize security threats, handle performance issues, and leverage network capabilities to support business needs.

Benefits of Network Visibility

With greater visibility, IT teams can improve security, generate cost savings, and reduce the time spent troubleshooting. Visibility allows teams to optimize the network and ensure regulatory compliance.

Increased security.

You can’t guard against threats you don’t see. Increased network visibility gives greater insight into the traffic entering your network and its behavior. Network monitoring tools can even examine encrypted traffic, preventing malware from cloaking itself to gain entry. In addition, if a breach does occur, network visibility ensures teams have the data they need to identify and mitigate the threat.

Improved application performance.

Network visibility provides data that improves application monitoring. The business can make sure traffic is sent to the appropriate servers, ensuring bandwidth is devoted to the applications that need that network segment’s capacity. Networks can be designed to ensure bandwidth is allocated to the systems that need it most.

Shape business transformation.

Network visibility provides data that can feed into analytics and guide data-driven business decisions. The data provides insights into trends that allow network maintenance and expansion activities to keep pace with changes in the business. Capacity planning can be driven by facts and figures rather than guesses.

Tools to Achieve Network Visibility

Most businesses will have some level of network monitoring, so to improve visibility, start by understanding your network design to identify your blind spots. Then you can address visibility needs by implementing a suite of tools to collect and process data. Application and network monitoring tools collect data, while analytics tools find the insights hidden inside. Monitoring strategies can rely on the SNMP protocol to poll resources or analyze traffic flows. Tools must be used carefully to ensure they don’t impact network performance and affect the user experience.

Prescient Solutions’ network services help businesses in Chicago and Schaumburg address their network needs. From designing robust and secure networks with sufficient capacity to support usage through ongoing maintenance, our network services keep business connectivity up and running. Contact us to talk about how you can improve network visibility and provide a better end user IT experience with IT consulting services from Prescient Solutions.