Real-time monitoring is always a good idea, no matter the size or complexity of your network. In the event of a threat situation, real-time monitoring allows notifications to be set for reporting purposes, and it cuts down on troubleshooting time. With today’s connected IT systems, finding issues in your network quickly and efficiently is key, and real-time monitoring plays a major role in this. The faster issues can be resolved, the more money your company saves.
Real-time monitoring provides businesses with network analytics to measure baseline performance
With real-time monitoring, businesses can observe the performance of their network. Real-time monitoring allows network operators and administrators to gather network analytics, providing them with a better understanding of how their network typically functions. If network operators and administrators are continually able to collect real-time data, analyze trends, and predict future behavior, they are able to make more informed business decisions. It also allows businesses to more easily identify when the network is not performing at its baseline, saving time when something may be wrong.
Real-time monitoring improves bandwidth utilization
During the implementation of a cloud service, bandwidth utilization is often not a concern, or it becomes an oversight. For example, e-mail is some of the lightest traffic around. However, if you have 1200 workstations and 400 smartphones connected to a server in your datacenter, but tomorrow they are all connecting to a server in the cloud, all that traffic (which was once running on the fast superhighway of the local network) is now going over a single shared internet connection. A good way to approach this issue is to deploy a cloud service with a few connectors and then monitor the bandwidth utilization. This set-up should give you a good estimate on what level of internet is required when deploying cloud services.
Real-time monitoring is instrumental in threat detection
The typical hacker will spend an average of 205 days in your network before discovery. Threat detection is the single greatest reason for real-time monitoring your network, as security breaches cost businesses lots of money. Some of the security services provided by real-time monitoring include:
- Active network scanning for network inventory and passive network monitoring
- Intrusion Detection for workstations and networks
- File integrity monitoring
- Vulnerability testing, assessment, and continuous monitoring
- Custom reports for issue correlation and even timeline incident response guidance
- Log Collection and Analysis
- Full Packet Capture and Mirror
- Integration in workstation AV for Next-Gen Firewall
- Failover Testing during a backup restore
Two main values that real-time monitoring offers within threat detection are decreased downtime and fewer man-hours. With the #1 message from business units to IT companies being that they should do more with less, these factors are key. If your business cannot afford to purchase a great pre-integrated monitoring tool, there are some decent free ones available. These 5 don’t have all the same features as the ones mentioned above, but they’re all valuable:
- The Dude
- Splunk
- Nagios
- Spiceworks
- OpenNMS
What are the real savings?
At the end of the day, real-time monitoring your network is just a good business practice. The time and money your business will save over the years through better network performance, improved bandwidth utilization, and threat detection far outweighs the service cost. If you’re interested in network monitoring and management from a professional Managed IT Services team, contact Bit-Wizards.