Your business is growing — how do you know if you need to upgrade your network?

You pause and look around you. You’ve hired new people. You’ve purchased new PCs. Sales figures are climbing. You feel a smile form as a realization hits you: You’re making it. Your business is taking off! You want to pat yourself on the back, but you feel like you’re forgetting something...something you’re supposed to be minding now that your company is bigger.

Here’s one item you should seriously look into if you hadn’t done so already: your IT network. Let’s take a look at how your business can outgrow your network and require an immediate upgrade:

Your IT systems are sluggish

There are many places where your infrastructure can underperform:

• Servers can’t handle the strain of handling more apps and network endpoints such as workstation PCs and employees’ portable devices
• Network connections don’t have enough bandwidth for more users
• Computers are old and can’t accommodate heavier system and app requirements

Nothing can put a damper on productivity and sales more than the tools that are meant to bolster both. Programs that lag or crash can turn employees’ enthusiasm into frustration and mediocrity. Websites that are slow to load increase bounce rates and abandoned carts. Internet calls that are choppy, staticky, or slurred get dropped more often.

Before any of these happen, regularly monitor the performance of your network and implement upgrades to prevent problems from blowing up. Better yet, have experts from a managed IT services provider (MSP) do this for you so that they can help your firm initiate proactive measures for improving performance instead of just being reactive to issues.

You’re running low on data storage space

Having more customers, employees, partners, and third-party vendors means creating, sharing, processing, and storing more data. Don’t wait until you’ve maxed out your storage capacity — expand it by doing any of the following:

• Increase and/or upgrade hardware memory
• Use portable data storage devices
• Implement cloud-based solutions

Cloud-based solutions are, by far, the most sensible of the three because of how cost-effective, secure, and scalable they are. More than merely expanding your storage capacity, these also allow you to enjoy data backups as well as have strategies for business continuity and disaster recovery.

You’re vulnerable to data breaches

Suffering data lockdowns, leaks, and theft can mean downtime, reputational damage, and regulatory penalties — all of which are costly and difficult to recover from. As they say, prevention is much better than cure, so if you haven’t run systems diagnostics in a while, have one done ASAP so that you can patch internal gaps in your network as well as fortify it against external threats.

Additionally, you have to check if you’re compliant with every data regulation that’s applicable to your business. Given how policies are increasing in number and change in accordance with shifts in technology, you’ll need a partner that can take on all aspects of data security.

Your IT network has become unwieldy

Expanding your business means adding more users to your network, each of whom might use more than one device to accomplish their work. You’ll have to implement mobile device management (MDM) apps and other tools to ensure efficiency without compromising data security. You’ll also have to regulate access for a greater number of vendors and partners, increase capacity for handling more customers, and augment cybersecurity measures.

What all of these point to is that boosting network management capabilities is part and parcel of a network upgrade — and that your old IT team might not be enough to handle this. You’ll want to talk with an MSP so that nothing can slow down the growth of your business.

If you wish to sustain business growth, you’ll need your network to grow with you. To learn how to make this happen, reach out to us. Let our network specialists at XBASE Technologies Corporation deliver Exponentially Better™ IT services that are custom-designed to fulfill the unique needs of your business.