Keeping your IT network healthy is absolutely vital to your company’s success – but it can be a very time-consuming task. This month, the CNS blogs have been looking at how managed IT network support services can give you peace of mind when your business can’t afford downtime. 

Far too many companies fail to realise how much impact your IT network’s health can have – on your day-to-day business, your finances, your reputation… SMEs are no different to large corporations in that they cannot afford the damage associated with an IT network failure.

In a world where organisations are increasingly reliant on software and hardware to keep business operational, it is vital to ensure that your IT network is reliable, high-performing and fit for purpose.

We understand that it’s difficult for a busy company to devote time to IT network maintenance and management, particularly if this is not one of your core competencies. In such situations, managed IT network support is ideal. 

If you have concerns about your network’s health, you should arrange for an accredited professional to give you a comprehensive overview of your IT system. Any well-managed IT network support provider, Capital Network Solutions included, will offer a free network infrastructure audit to all its new customers.

The following checklist from our partner company, Cisco Support UK, outlines key measurements you need to get a picture of how healthy your IT network is:

• Ethernet segments should not feature a sustained utilisation of 40% or higher
• All Ethernet segments should be switched – there should be no shared segments
• For Ethernet segments, there should be less than 0.1% collisions
• No WAN links should feature a sustained utilisation of 70% or higher
• Response times should generally be less than 100ms
• LAN response times should generally be 2ms
• No segments should have more than one CRC error per million bytes of data
• No segments should have more than 20% multicast or broadcast traffic
• Over 5-minute intervals, CPU utilisation should not exceed 75%
• The number of output queue drops should not exceed 100 in an hour
• The number of input queue drops should not exceed 50 in an hour
• The number of buffer misses should not exceed 25 in an hour
• The number of ignored packets should not exceed 10 in an hour

Capital Network Solutions provides a wide range of customer-led managed IT network support services, including audits, design and installation. Our engineers tackle many different IT issues every day, are fully trained and carry the latest tech and a range of spare parts to suit most standard computers and servers.

CNS works with a number of industry-leading vendors such as Cisco Support UK, Dell, Barracuda, HP and Microsoft to ensure the right solution is designed, deployed and supported for each client’s business needs.