IT teams are looking for new ways to optimize their network performance. This is becoming more important than ever, as experts become increasingly concerned about network speed, security, and other challenges. There are a lot of guides on improving bandwidth, but there are other issues that have to be addressed as well.
IT professionals have been much more focused on automation in recent years, but the growing focus on virtualization has caused the trend to accelerate. The jobs of system administrators and networking professionals have become a lot more complex as they have become more reliant on virtualization. They are finding new ways to use technology, such as open source code and networking tools to streamline their operations and improve the quality of networking tasks. Virtualization is very important for creating new traffic sources, according to Jim Frey, the head of the research team for Enterprise Management Associates. Frey said that the field has been changing much more rapidly in recent years. This is a challenge that network administrators didn’t face a decade ago, but they must be far more adaptable to new developments these days.
IT teams must be very careful about monitoring their networks and keep up to date with the latest management and security standards. They can’t do this without investing in the highest quality tools available to them. However, they have to prioritize their expenditures and be more selective about the products they invest in, due to new budget constraints that have been imposed in recent years.
Rick Harrison, the Director of the MIS program for Columbia, Tennessee, said that it is important to get the most value out of their existing staff. This is particularly important for municipalities and other small organizations that are constrained by small budgets.
Here are some strategies companies can use to allocate their resources more wisely to improve operational efficiencies.
Focus on Management Tool Consolidation
While enterprises must always invest in specialized tools geared towards particular IT domains, they must also look at the big picture. They have to rely on IT solutions that offer a wider range of functions, rather than getting too focused on technology that is focused on specific issues.
In addition, IT departments should discuss needs amongst all team members and make collaborative decisions when selecting tools that meet all of their needs. One example would be a log analysis system that could be used by all of the network, systems, and application teams.
Top Security Considerations
There are a number of security protocols that network administrators must implement. Some of them are listed below:
- Define appropriate user rights for each area. Users with administrator rights can perform harmful tasks, make changes that go unnoticed but still lower the security level of the network, fall into traps and thus execute malicious programs that would have administrator privileges, and cause access data to be stolen, allowing third parties to log in. To increase security, it is necessary for each user to have the appropriate level for the tasks to be performed, and to minimize the number of users with administrator privileges.
- Only use trusted sites when you plan to download files. Not all locations on the Internet are created equal, with some being more secure than others. Make sure that content can only be downloaded from trusted sites (ideally from manufacturers’ own websites and not generic sites). Also consider who needs to download files from the Internet, with the possibility of limiting permissions only to trusted users who need it to do their job and teaching them how to do it securely.
- Audit files shared over networks. Many malicious programs spread through networks and this is generally because there is little or no security on network shares. We must remove unnecessary shared drives and protect the rest and connections to limit the spread of malware.
All of these security considerations must be implemented properly. The safety of the entire network hinges on them.
New Network Administrators Must Take Major Steps to Adapt to Change
There are a number of changes that network administrators must be prepared to tackle in 2021. They should understand the most important optimization strategies and embrace them as needed. This will be the key to having greater job security.
