Love your Local Area Network
A Local Area Network is the foundation of your business. We spend large amounts of time on selecting the thinnest laptops and phones. But what about your network? This article puts the spotlight on this often overlooked technology. Every network needs love and attention.
Why Should I love my Local Area Network?
A Local Area Network or LAN, is the plumbing which enables all your laptops, desktops and WIFI mobile devices to talk to each other.
It is called Local Area, well because it local , it is in your building. You will often find network devices hiding under tables or in the corner of a hot dusty cabinet where the device is slowly overheating and going slightly mad.
In this article I’m going to show you why you need to show you network some love
There are many types of devices which create a Local Area Network, the most common is the Ethernet switch. This is the device that you connect to directly
Even if you are using WIFI you are still connecting to a Ethernet switch of some kind.
You can often spot them hiding under desks with blinky lights and lots of untidy Ethernet cables piled up in front of it.
You may have a small dinky one for small work groups. Or Big Iron for connecting hundreds of users.
Either way the Local Area Network is often misused. forgotten and abused.
Its time to show your Local Area Network some love.
Your network is the foundation of everything that you do with your computers. We now demand that our networks carry voice traffic, Network attached storage, IP Cameras, Bring Your Own Device, Guest and Staff WIFI and mission critical Cloud services.
It does not matter how great your cloud services are , or how responsive your new social media 3.0 Big data website is, If your network is feeling unloved so will all your applications.
3 Easy ways to show your network some love
(1) Replace those tired switches
Those switches you bought back in 1995 are not going to be able to do all the fancy new things asked of them.. This is because they are likely to be a lot slower, and have a lot of the techie nerd knobs missing to make all this new fancy stuff work.
Its time to replace those 20 year old devices which you have plugged together over the years with some new switches which have the required nerd knobs to enable the new functionality required.
Now don’t run out and by the best branded most expensive devices, or go the other way and buy the cheapest you can find at your local supermarket. That would be stupid.
I will have another article coming soon showing you how to select the correct devices.
(2) Apply some network design ( No more plug and pray !)
How you plug these devices together and want nerd knobs you turn on or off is called “network design”. This is based on security, performance types of devices, number of users and a few other things. However this is the essence of network design. And you will need some, network design
(3) Look after your cables
Don’t forget your cables, Be kind to them. I have found cables with broken clips, crushed under the wheels of chairs, fibre cables nailed to walls and other murderous things you could do to a cable. All bad things to make your network sulk and feel sorry for itself.
A well loved and well designed network is a major asset to your business.
- It is the cheapest form of bandwidth available to you.
- No Fair usage policy
- No penalties for going over your transfer rate
- enables you to take advantage of the latest trends in computing
The trend is to move a lot of key services outside of the LAN to the Cloud, I have a few of warnings here:
- Even if you are using cloud services you STILL need a well designed network.
- Depending the service used, you could end up hair-pinning your data. This is a techie term for waste of bandwidth and reduce capacity.
- Moving your key services outside your LAN means that your bandwidth costs will go up. Don’t forget the word unlimited has taken on a different meaning in modern marketing.
- Bandwidth costs money, and the Internet Providers are desperate to make money to cover the explosion in bandwidth consumption. They are currently fighting to charge more for different services used on the Internet, this is argument is called network neutrality
How will these changes affect your business if you have pushed all your keys services into the cloud.
Your Local Area Network is working hard to protect your interests, show it some love.