Time is money. And slow networks and unexpected outages eat away at your profit margin.  

The network's job is to connect users, on any device, from any location to data and applications that enable work and productivity.  

Take care of your network with a multi-faceted strategy to ensure maximum efficiency. 

No matter how your business consumes cloud and data center services, security controls and connectivity are key enablers of business outcomes. Those in leadership roles must prepare a vision for IT consumption and understand why the organization may need a comprehensive, cloud-based Network solution to remain competitive. 

Imagine that you had a single dashboard to monitor the health of your network, identify specific problem areas, and have responsive support to resolve incidents quickly to avoid downtime. Wouldn’t that provide tremendous value to your daily operations?  

Take a moment to reflect on the following questions to structure a vision of how you want your network to operate.  

Have these questions triggered doubt in your current Network capabilities? Or give you an IT wish list to support your organization with a comprehensive Network Management solution? 

Enterprises can capitalize on improved availability and secure data delivery by integrating network management and security solutions.  

Perhaps you have been considering moving to the cloud to consume network services as an OpEx due to your aging network infrastructure? Maybe you don't have the budget, or the desire, to upgrade your network infrastructure. Either way, comparing the impact of inconsistent network connectivity on your enterprise to a demand-based cost model makes economic sense to outsource for network excellence. 

Who can you trust to put your network first? Look for a Managed Services Provider (MSP) with network engineers and architects who are certified in the technology you are using or the technology you want to use. Look for an MSP with extensive network and cloud experience that has matured processes and can help support your business productivity. 

Outsourcing your Network management can finally give you the visibility you deserve, using the tech you may not be able to afford on your own to optimize the performance of your network infrastructure. An MSP can deliver network availability with security, consistency, and reliability to keep you in business. In addition, a qualified MSP can increase visibility into the health of your network with regular reporting and proactive monitoring. Customized dashboards can give you that single pane of glass view into your environment as a dependable means to address your network's risk, budget, and overall management. 

Has your IT team been inundated with alerts? Do they have a prioritization plan and remediation run books? Extended, unplanned outages reduce stability and make your network vulnerable to attacks. To bolster your business continuity and disaster readiness, an experienced MSP can integrate your existing tools with their industry-leading monitoring and security tools to highlight problem areas and keep your data and workloads moving efficiently. 

Outages impact everyone from the executive leadership team to your customers. And a customer who can’t access your website will go to your competitor for better service availability. Save time and frustration for your end-users and build trust by deploying market-ready network management solutions. As a critical component of business continuity, a fully operational network can securely transmit data and applications, balance traffic, and provide end-to-end security.  

Consistent network availability is critical to productivity if your organization makes up part of the 75% (Sorry--need link back!) of businesses that plan to maintain a permanent hybrid workforce. MSPs offer a suite of WAN technologies that deliver the same performance standards, end-user experience, and security policies, no matter where your employees work. Remote users require the same desktop experience as their in-office counterparts; this is possible through architecting an integrated WAN extension. As centralized office locations no longer limit your talent pool, supporting a hybrid workforce allows you to hire and retain top talent, improving your profit margins and business outlook. 

Networks have a lot of interdependent parts that must work in tandem to complete the job of delivering data and applications. While many single components are critical for the network's operational efficiency, and if one element fails, say the firewall, router, switches, WAN, or cloud services, the disruption brings down the entire network like a line of dominoes.  

Therefore, it is essential to have automation tools for configuration, continuous monitoring, provisioning, and intelligent consolidation of like incidents. While automation can reduce human errors, a reliable, responsive SOC can fix tickets, troubleshoot repeated outages, and provide stakeholders with analytics to make intelligent decisions to improve the network.  

While network automation tools are plentiful, Gartner reports that only 35% of enterprises are using automation tools for network activities. Why? Because tool integration is complex, teams within the same organization often use different tools, adding to the confusion of duplicative incidents and frustration with repeated outages. But manual processes are fraught with mistakes, slow, and nearly impossible to scale as your organization grows, so make automation a priority when building or improving your network infrastructure.  

 “On-premises and cloud infrastructure will co-exist and grow increasingly interoperable, allowing for greater portability and flexibility that will benefit organizations in a hybrid world.”              – SWZD’s 2022 State of IT report 

So how can you maintain consistent network availability across distributed sites for hybrid work without wasting time and resources? An MSP can provide the people, processes, and top-tier technologies to support your network functionality and respond to incidents quickly. A qualified MSP can integrate your existing tools onto a single platform to increase visibility and ensure connectivity. And if your tools are not meeting your business requirements or can't grow with your organization, an MSP can recommend a new path to achieve your vision. 

With an MSP providing continuous monitoring and provisioning, you can expect low latency and higher availability than you are experiencing now. MSPs are key players in finding the root causes of repeated outages and have processes for alerting, ticketing, incident AI filtering, and change controls. An MSP that provides multiple IT services can use service intelligence and predictive analytics to understand your unique environment and consolidate visibility on a centralized platform. 

Are you worried about your sensitive data moving between users, the cloud, data centers, and centralized work hubs? Moving sensitive data and applications across the network is an exercise in active defense. Using a layered defense of safeguards—role-based access restrictions, endpoint management, network monitoring, email security, traffic balancing, network segmentation—and training users to use ‘trust but verify’ cyber hygiene protocols will help protect your organization.  

In addition, data in transit must be encrypted when it traverses the network as part of the layered defense model of network security. Suppose you don't already have a next-generation firewall (NGFW)? In that case, you are missing out on advanced security capabilities that can, and should, be integrated seamlessly with your platform as part of a centralized management solution. As infrastructure security becomes more critical to support a hybrid workforce, NGFWs enhance threat detection, block malware from entering the network, promote security controls, and give IT teams increased response capabilities.  

Look for an MSP that offers NGFW that integrates with a centralized management solution and threat intelligence for your network and has these feature sets: 

Regardless of your industry, data security is your responsibility. Everyone is at risk of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, cybersecurity breaches, sophisticated ransomware and phishing campaigns, and internal sabotage. DDoS attacks have increased to 1,174% packets per second in the last two years. If you are not prepared to mitigate malicious traffic, consider the revenue losses that can accumulate due to unavailable websites, failure to access workloads and applications, and inability to respond to customers.  

When nation-states sponsor cyberattacks, meeting compliance requirements around sensitive data like research and development, financial information, personally identifiable information, and trade secrets isn't easy. Intelligent SD-WAN solutions can detect and respond to DDoS attacks by rerouting traffic to minimize or eliminate downtime.  

Can you afford more than a month of post-attack recovery time like 58% of companies victimized by ransomware attacks? The best way to prepare your defense is to have a good offense—monitor for anomalies in your systems, define disaster recovery efforts, have solid data backup and recovery solutions in place and test your ability to activate resources in a crisis.  

Remember, most cybersecurity liability insurance policies won't cover internal sabotage, breaches due to negligent mitigation of known vulnerabilities, or configuration mismanagement. Find an MSP that will dive into your environment, find your technology gaps, and partner with you to fortify your defenses and maintain compliance requirements. 

A qualified MSP can help you build a cloud-based network infrastructure with a security-first approach. While you enjoy the scalability and reliability of cloud services without the hassle of maintaining physical infrastructure, an MSP can provide 24/7/365 network monitoring and alerting to safeguard your data and maintain your network health.  

Deploying a virtual software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) as part of your cloud-based network infrastructure requires foresight and intimate knowledge of your network. Fully remote and hybrid users deserve the same connectivity, uniform security, and performance standards as in-house employees. While SD-WAN plays a vital role in network performance, connectivity, security integration, and traffic routing, it supports workplace productivity by delivering applications hosted on-premise, in data centers, and in public and private clouds, where 50% of enterprise workloads are still running.  

SD-WAN can also increase end-to-end visibility, but only when integrated with additional tools to manage the network's orchestration, provisioning, and deployment so that analytics and reporting are meaning full and directly correlate to availability and root causes of latency. SD-WAN is also application-aware and can intelligently steer traffic across select network paths for low latency and high availability based on business requirements. 

Network initiatives must be coordinated across teams and integrated into the organization's overall vision to ensure there aren't duplicative efforts, unplanned downtime, or overlapping solutions. Solid Incident, Problem, and Change management programs are integral to consistent network delivery and security. Any unplanned outages can cause significant disruptions and impact productivity. 

An MSP with mature Incident, Problem, and Change management processes can drive alignment across departments. Process transparency and clear communication are critical enablers of successful deployments. Some IT leaders balk at an MSP coming in and calling the shots – but it doesn’t work that way. You can maintain network operations control while an MSP supports your network viability and shoulders the burden of maintaining, securing, building, and scaling services on your network infrastructure. Think of it as fractional ownership of the ‘latest and greatest’ security and network tools that you couldn’t afford on your own, managed by experts, and monitored 24/7/365 by engineers who have your best interest in mind.  

Your vision will drive the organization, while the IT tools are just the mechanisms to get you where you want to be. Let your tools work for you by integrating network management and security with cloud-based resources. An MSP can help you be more responsive to demand fluctuations, save time with expert provisioning, and save money with an OpEx model of network consumption where you move from static, hardware-based infrastructure to a dynamic, efficient, and scalable cloud-based infrastructure. Real efficiencies balance network consolidation with mature processes to move away from manual maintenance tasks. 

As you work to find an MSP that meets your technology objectives, get key stakeholders aligned on your vision and business goals that will structure your IT journey. Remember that IT is an exercise in continuous improvement, so aim for maturity.

An MSP can then help to coordinate network initiatives and help you to:  

1. Define business requirements across IT functionality
2. Identify current tools and IT resources 
3. Run discovery to find your technology gaps 
4. Prioritize network security with continuous monitoring 
5. Solidify processes and approvals for change management 
6. Define response protocols for event management - alerting, response, and remediation   
7. Automate for visibility 

A secure and robust network is crucial to the continuity of business operations and critical to your overall IT strategy. Many organizations are only automating 35% of their network activities and missing out on the opportunity to drive operational efficiency, limit downtime, and cut costs. An automated and virtualized network architecture can connect your hybrid users to their applications and workloads, optimize workload traffic across multi-cloud environments, and deploy access restrictions, security, and privacy policies across all users. 

You can expect more than simple monitoring and maintenance when outsourcing your network's architecture, service design, and technical management to an MSP. Expect transparent and frequent communication and discussions about IT services strategy, including design coordination, assurances that new deployments have pre-established standards and configurations, and end-to-end network support. 

Organizations cannot achieve true digital maturity to address event management and security without a unified network solution and structure. An MSP can design and implement the system you need, report on meaningful metrics, and work to provide consistent network availability despite IT budget constraints and increased demands on productivity. 

A fully managed network solution is the best way to achieve a consistent and cost-effective approach to the implementation of cutting-edge network technologies, but if you rely on your in-house network teams, be sure they are doing these baseline tasks:  

          - Segmenting your network to keep ‘visitors’ away from accessing your core processes                and data 
          - Tracking of all assets and devices connected to your network 
          - Automating device configurations 
          - Monitoring endpoints 
          - Prioritizing network security 
          - Tracking licensing 
          - Monitoring capacity 
          - Controlling change  
          - Implementing 24/7/365 alerting and incident response 

But if you don’t have the time, energy, resources, or desire to manage your own network, TBConsulting, a Managed Services Provider headquartered in Phoenix, AZ, can design, deploy, monitor, and manage your network for optimal health. TBC has global experience providing services to enhance your IT performance and support your digital infrastructure. TBC's cross-functional teams work to remove technology and information siloes that plague productivity. 

Network Total Care is TBC's comprehensive, cloud-based, full-service solution to manage network operations, maintenance, security, and infrastructure. Organizations rely on Network Total Care to safely and efficiently transmit data, applications, and workflows between physical locations, hybrid workforces, and the cloud. 

TBConsulting's certified network architects, experienced security engineers, and systems specialists are well versed in providing comprehensive network management with a purpose – to keep you up & running – with stable, end-to-end network services.  

With a fully managed and provisioned network infrastructure, TBC's Network Total Care solution can relieve the nagging doubt about your business continuity preparedness. TBC removes the configuration mishaps that can choke your revenue streams and send your IT teams into firefighting drills. We understand your frustration when vendors do not keep their contractual obligations. We strive to provide visibility and transparency into our processes and take ownership of incident resolution, diagnosis, and remediation for rapidly restoring network services. TBC will take over routine management while you maintain operational control.  

Network management is complex, resource-heavy, and costly. If misconfigured, a compromised network inhibits growth and security, leaving you vulnerable to cyberattacks. As regulatory compliance demands increase, you need an MSP with the discipline, controls, management experience, and security expertise to maintain your network. 

Partner with TBC to see the following business benefits: 

          - Evolution of network services to address future business requirements 
          - Creation of technology standards 
          - Technical leadership in sorting through all the noise/options available to address your                future requirements and ensure maximum return on future network investments: 
          - Consistent QoS (Quality of Service) designs 
          - Organization satisfaction 
          - Reduced TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) 
          - Improved service performance 
          - Reduction in number of incidents 
          - Reduction in incident resolution time 
          - Increased confidence in TBC’s services 
          - Effective knowledge management – a powerful asset for people in all roles across all                stages of the service lifecycle (also critical to resolving incidents and increasing the                    overall performance and availability of your organization’s network services) 

At TBC, our people are our most valuable resources, and we continue to invest in our education and explore new technologies to improve our client outcomes. As exploitable attack vectors grow, organizations must mature their IT lifecycle management, security monitoring, and availability management for a flexible, scalable, stable environment that every business needs. Our service level management program provides governance and control across the various service entitlements, processes, and systems necessary to manage your organization's entire lifecycle of services. It covers strategy, design, transition, operation, account governance, and continuous improvement of services. 

TBC offers custom incident framework categorization based on urgency, impact, and priority as part of our Network Total Care solution. TBC implements strict escalation processes and defines resolution responsibilities based on your unique business profiles. We deliver monthly reports to identify root causes and recommended remediation actions. Our network automation tools simplify network management and allow for more precise availability planning, and enterprise organizations can enjoy value-based improvements in uptime, agility, scalability, and maintenance. 

Manual maintenance of your network is slow and expensive. Get more out of your network with application performance management for greater orchestration, consistency, availability, and anomaly monitoring and maintenance. At TBConsulting, our proven Incident, Problem, and Change processes help define your network infrastructure and operations' configuration, deployment, management, monitoring, and maintenance. TBC's certified engineers and architects use industry-leading tools (Veeam, Cisco, Nutanix) and best practices to power our Network Total Care solution. TBC wants to relieve your IT teams of the daily grind of too many alerts, slow transmissions, and downtime surprises. 

Schedule a call with our Network team today to learn how TBC can improve your network performance. -