We’ve written plenty about how important it is to monitor your business’ network performance. Just about every company, small, large and everything in between, is tied to the internet in some manner.

We’ve written about the importance of knowing things like latency, jitter, outages, throughput, bandwidth utilization and the overall health of your current network. Blogs about tracking and trending key network indicators every day, every week, every month.

We gave you real life examples of clients that had to deal with decisions regarding their network.

The client that was moving and had to find a new Internet provider. What do we need in the new space? Is it enough? Is it too much?

The client that acquired another company and was doubling their employees. All of a sudden, their office was twice the size it was last Monday. Do we have enough speed? Do we have enough bandwidth?

(Spoiler alert – if you’ve been following our blog, you know that they had enough of both.) Because they’ve already been tracking and trending. They already knew, when the ISP told them, because they doubled the number of employees, they needed to double their bandwidth, that wasn’t the case. And they saved hundreds of dollars a month because they had that information.

Now it’s a hard sell to tell SMBs that they need to monitor their network day in and day out. Most have little or no problem with their current service. Until they do have a problem. Or until they want to make a change.

Let’s migrate to the Cloud. Let’s subscribe to that SaaS – Software as a Service (we have a blog about that too). We’re upsizing, we’re downsizing, we want to switch over to Internet phones, we want to start taking orders and payments online.

That’s all great. But what you need, before you pull the trigger, is someone to come in and make sure that your current network is up to the task. And if your SMB doesn’t have an IT staff on site, that can be difficult. And expensive.

We’re going to throw an industry term at you. Network Performance Assessment (NPA). If you’re not monitoring network performance every day, you have to find a company that can give you an assessment of your network’s performance so you know, not guess, what you need going forward.

Now we have no one in mind (just kidding, yes we do), and we’re not going to blow our own horn (kidding again, yes we are), but it’s in your best interest, as an SMB, if you’re changing locations, if you’re migrating to the cloud, if you’re thinking about using SaaS, VoIP, video conferencing, if your business depends on making online payment transactions, etc., etc., etc., that you find a company that can assess your network performance and present trending patterns to you in a manner that makes sense. 

Let’s roar into the ‘20’s with the expectation of making all our businesses prosperous and profitable.