IT Network, the Small Business Backbone
How important is the IT Network for a small business?
The IT network provides the infrastructure for communication, data sharing, and efficient workflow management. It is a critical component for your business. From small to large companies, the IT network requires special attention to be effectively structured.
Small businesses typically face situations that may lead to operation disruption, affecting productivity, compromising your privacy, and being a huge obstacle for your company’s growth.
IT Network Common Headaches
Slow network
You may be facing bandwidth limitations, network congestion, delays loading web pages, file transfers taking long times, sluggish online applications performance, opening files from shared resources taking forever, issues when saving documents leading to file corruption or data loss, vital information that sometimes took hours to work on. All of this because of network misconfigurations, outdated network hardware and software, bad wiring, and poorly managed environments.
Weak or Unstable Wi-Fi Coverage
Frequent wi-fi connection drops, poor signal strength in certain areas of your company, unreliable connections due to access points misplacement, bad configuration, or interference.
Security Threats
Data breaches, virus or malware infections, ransomware attacks, and unauthorized access to your network and systems, due to lack of the minimum security equipment.
Connection issues for remote workers
Difficulties on remote connections to the company network and frequent disconnections due to poor configurations, limited bandwidths, or incompatibilities with home networks.
Scalability Issues
Things get worse when adding new team members and devices to your network due to a bad network design that prevents flexibility and effectiveness when your company needs to expand.
Setting up your IT Network
Setting up an IT network for a small business requires a balance between functionality and security. A well-designed network allows your team to communicate and collaborate. A properly managed network fosters reliability and provides the necessary elements for fast decision-making, centralizing your data, and ensuring secure access by protecting valuable business information.
Just like a good blueprint is required in the process of building a new house, so is network design for any business. As a small business, start with essential network components and services and add more advanced elements as it grows.
IT Network Layout Recommendations
Choose a good Internet Service Provider
Having a good internet service is a key decision. Internet providers are quickly evolving and providing affordable services for small businesses. You may encounter limitations depending on your location and budget. These are your alternatives:
Fiber-Optics Internet
With speeds up to 1Gigabit per second or Gbps. Fiber based communications are fast, more reliable, and stable. Ideal for high demand communications and for primary internet services. You may find higher bandwidths with some providers, but the budget is higher as well.
DSL internet
With speeds from 100 to 500 Megabits per second or Mbps. It can be less consistent and as it usually comes shared with your neighbors, you may experience slow performance on peak hours. Ideal for backup internet service to provide fail-over protection from down times when your primary service fails
5G Wireless Internet
If you don’t have a choice of having Fiber or DSL, go for wireless 5G internet, but make sure that good data caps and speeds are provided. Acceptable for backup internet service to provide fail-over protection from down times when your primary service fails.
Satellite Internet
For rural or remote areas with speeds up to 100 Megabits per second. Availability may vary depending on your geographical location, and service may be impacted by atmospheric conditions like rain, fog, cloud cover, solar flares, or snow.
Always make sure that the chosen Internet Service provides 24/7 support.
Choose your Network Equipment
Select reliable business class equipment. There are several affordable brands for small businesses. Invest in manageable equipment as this will allow custom configurations, flexibility, network control and monitoring.
Invest in firewall hardware to protect from cyber threats and use Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology for remote workers. Implement strong security. Never, never forget about security. It is necessary to be prepared for the unwanted and unauthorized people. You don’t want them to interact with your systems and data.
Plan and design your network Layout
Wired Local Area Network (LAN)
Use Ethernet cabling for critical devices like servers and for teams that handle sensitive and critical information, for example, finance and accounting departments.
Wireless Network
Deploy wireless for flexibility and mobile devices. Avoid important devices from connecting wirelessly.
Use Network Segmentation
Separate your network into Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) to improve security and performance.
Cabling
Use CAT6 or newer versions of Ethernet cable to ensure adequate network speeds and other present or future functionalities like Voice over IP communications. As the cable category increases, the maximum speed increases as well. CAT6 supports up to 10gbps speeds while CAT8 can go up to 40Gpbs depending on distance. CAT5E or CAT6 are typically sufficient, but CAT5E is becoming outdated for high demand applications.
Conclusion
As a small business, it is strongly recommended to delegate your network design and management to a recognized IT support team and ensure that it performs as expected, that it supports your business operations, and that it easily scales.
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