Photo credit: Hindu Business Line
Across the world people love various sports, be it basketball, football, tennis or cricket. There are humongous number of diehard fans who would not miss the matches and their updates. Recently, our president, Raj Sabhlok shared his thoughts on America’s March Madness (NCAA basketball tournament) and India’s IPL craze that can be enjoyed even being at work. He chalked out 5 tips that can help keep the employees as well as the IT department happy. Here they are:
1.Establish IT policies that address business and personal apps on the network: In the era of BYOD and “work from anywhere, at any time,” companies need to accommodate a reasonable degree of personal usage of their corporate networks. Just don’t let your employees inadvertently bring down the network by overwhelming it with reasonable personal use. For IT teams, this means setting alerts based on bandwidth utilization and identifying bandwidth threats before they get out of hand. Ideally, IT teams will set real-time alerts and business-hour filters, so they’re notified about problems — and can fix them — as they happen.
2.Monitor your network for availability or poor performance: The corporate network pumps business-critical and highly-sensitive information inside the company and out to the world at large. Any degradation in performance or disruption in availability can have grave consequences in both the short term and long term. In addition to seriously damaging the company’s reputation, poor network performance and availability can hamper productivity and adversely affect the overall mission of the company.
Every IT organization — in SMBs and enterprise organizations alike — needs to vigilantly monitor network availability and performance. This isn’t a luxury. It’s a mandatory network task that can be accomplished with affordable, real-time tools that provide IT teams with visibility and analytics.
3.Evaluate the bandwidth vampires: Simply put, bandwidth is the lifeblood of the company. That means a key part of your job is to identify and eliminate the bandwidth vampires, those unauthorized and bandwidth-sucking personal applications that adversely impact the performance of the applications that actually run your business.
With the right tools installed, IT teams must create and analyze highly granular reports on network bandwidth utilization. Performing such granular network analysis will help shine a light on the bandwidth vampires.
4.Monitor app traffic in real time and make changes on the fly: Between configuring network devices, resolving trouble tickets and beyond, IT teams just don’t have a lot of free time. But carving out a few hours to create appropriate policies that prioritize the function of mission-critical applications will be time well spent. By assigning the highest priority to CRM, ERP, email and other core apps, you can prevent March Madness, cat videos and the like from undermining your business.
5.Get control over which apps employees are using on their mobile devices: Employees aren’t just watching hoops on their desktops or laptops. They’re watching on their mobile devices, too. That means IT departments have got to expand their real-time monitoring to include mobile devices, both company-issued and personally owned. IT managers need to be able to take control at any time and be able to regulate applications that run on the network on any mobile device. And if you don’t already have one, get an effective mobile device management (MDM) strategy in place sooner rather than later.
You can read separate articles on Forbes and Hindu Business Line.
