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Articles

The Importance of Proper Internet Utilization and Best Practices

Posted by Lee-Ann Coleman, Jolee Electronics 19-12-2019 10:25 AM

Leading providers in unified communications are educating their customers on the recent expansion of bandwidth monitoring and management solutions. Essentially, bandwidth monitoring is the practice and policy of tracking the utilization of company bandwidth between all employees, software applications and desktops. The growth of bandwidth management solutions in recent years is due primarily to growth of company provided and personal devices (smart phones, tablets, etc.) connected to an organization’s network.

Any company that provides cloud-devices, software or applications that run over a data network must ensure that bandwidth is being consumed properly. This notion reflects the current state of most solutions, which are simply being strained to the point where many business owners notice that the devices, applications and software underperform. In essence, it’s like siphoning out all of the gas from a car, and then blaming the car for running on fumes. The problem lies with poor policy making and a lack of guidelines for employees on how to properly utilize the Internet in a work environment. 

On many occasions, we’ve found that up to 40% of employees are choking bandwidth and making it harder for other people to do their work.  Quarterly reviews can be conducted with customers where an assessment is made of the performance of all technologies provided. The clients get a global perspective on their network, what its performance is, and how it can be better. The overarching goal is to make sure that the customers’ businesses are performing at more productive levels. This is how productivity is quantified. That is the reason why MSP’s lead these meetings with device performance audits. With bandwidth being the central resource upon which nearly every technology relies, we have to make sure that it is being consumed in accordance with best practices before any other steps are taken.

In addition to the underperformance of the network and the drain on productivity this can cause, many business owners appreciate technology audits. Why? Because they uncover how much time employees are spending on various sites that have nothing to do with their job. This gives tremendous insight on the productivity, or lack thereof, with certain employees. One of the quickest ways to immediately boost customer profitability is to restrict the bandwidth of employees to sites that are exclusively productive in nature, as opposed to entertainment-based sites.

In some cases, employees simply don’t know that their bandwidth consumption is slowing the rest of the team down. For instance, new parents can put their children in daycare and stream the video from time to time to see how their child is doing throughout the day. Inherently, there’s nothing wrong with this, if done on occasion. However, when a parent leaves one of these streaming videos up while they begin working on other things, the rest of the team will notice the lag time that slows down their own desktop.

Ultimately, the network is simply a shared resource that needs some guidelines in place, especially in the new employee handbook. With a comprehensive bandwidth consumption policy in place, business owners can rest assured that their software, hardware and online tools will all function at optimal levels.

Lee-Ann Coleman, Jolee Electronics.