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When it comes to keeping your IT network performing optimally , finding and fixing network faults certainly is crucial. But it’s just as crucial to sustain network operations while the issue gets resolved.

Which means that the first order of business is to ensure that your network has entered one of the failure modes you’ve designed for it so that remaining network resources are allocated according to your organization’s business priorities.

Even before you automate your network performance monitoring and management, you’ll need to do some planning. If you don’t have experts on hand, consider bringing in a reliable, dependable network advisor to help you :

Establish a performance baseline
Planning involves establishing baseline performance thresholds — called quality-of-service (QoS) rules — using historical data, estimates of how existing services will grow, and anticipated demand for new services.To determine if your plan is working, you’ll need to measure current network behavior. Such metrics include the traffic generated at certain interface points and the load levels of trunks and devices.

This is how network administrators monitor and manage network conditions. When conditions are out of whack, an alert is generated.

These alerts can indicate an emerging issue, such as a need for additional resources, or a serious problem, such as load levels so high that network and/or application performance has been impacted.

One of the greatest threats to your company’s productivity comes from poor IT network performance . Yet it can be tough to maintain a healthy network in the face of cost constraints, changes to your business, and constantly evolving technologies.

Which can put you between a rock and a hard place, because when it comes to your organization’s IT network, what you need — regardless of whether you’ve undertaken virtualization or cloud computing or unified communications — is a stable framework for delivering communication, applications, and services that provide a consistent, reliable experience under normal conditions.

For quite some time, small and midsized businesses dared to feel safe from most malicious attacks — thanks to their relative smallness. Over the last couple of years, that’s been changing, because larger firms are tightening defenses and, as I’ve said before, the bad guys exploit opportunity.

Which is why shoddy IT security is a wide open opportunity for hackers to rip you off.

So I’m finishing our list with two elements easily overlooked as you face the hassles of keeping up with criminal creativity.

#9 Educate your employees about security