A Reminder to Upgrade Your Networking Hardware

Your organization lives and dies by the strength of its network. If it’s not running well, your entire business will feel it, and it could have serious implications for operations. You might end up with sluggish software or data transfers, among other problems. Listed below are some of the common holdups on your network that might be holding your business back.

Wireless Routers

With wireless access points like a router, you give your other devices opportunities to connect to the network—devices that power your business, like smartphones, laptops, and the like.

Wireless routers kind of fall to the wayside, though, and it’s easy to go for years without considering an upgrade. Older routers struggle to work with modern devices, and this means slower and less reliable connections that impact your productivity. You should upgrade every so often to more modern wireless access points, as the difference is quite noticeable.

Moreover, more recent networking standards have better performance and can offer simultaneous different networks with greater security features, which gives your business more power to protect itself against the countless threats out there.

Firewalls

Speaking of threats… you really want to stop them before they break through your network, and that involves using firewalls.

You want to keep your firewall updated with the latest threat definitions, which means you can’t just set it up and forget that it exists. Older firewalls aren’t prepared to hold up against today’s sophisticated threats, so you want to ensure that you’ve upgraded your firewalls. Look for features such as advanced threat intelligence, intrusion prevention, and deep packet inspection, all of which will make your business more resilient.

Security solutions only work when you configure them correctly and update them as needed, so make sure you’re doing both.

Network Switches

Network switches, which act as hubs for your wired devices, are also critical pieces of hardware that must be updated from time to time.

Any wired device, like a computer, printer, or server, interfaces with your network switch to transfer data. Your organization will quickly outgrow your older switches, which means that they won’t have the capacity or speed to handle the greater traffic. As you can imagine, this means less efficiency than if you were to upgrade to a solution with more bandwidth.

By upgrading your network switches, you’ll experience fewer bottlenecks, greater file transfer speeds, and better network efficiency.

If you’re ready to improve your network’s performance, contact Macro Systems at 703-359-9211 today.