Network Monitoring: The key to a safer, more efficient business

There are a lot of vicious sharks out there swimming around in the IT ocean. These predators (hackers) are constantly on the prowl for an opening or vulnerability in your network so they can attack and cause serious damage. Attacks on small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) has actually risen from 18% in 2011 to 43% in 2015, and the trend just keeps going with Forbes predicting that the cost of cyber attacks will rise to $2.9 trillion in 2019.

How do you protect your network against these dangers? For any business, the first step should be to establish a network monitoring system. With real-time network monitoring from Affinity IT Group, we’ll provide your business with tools that monitor everything that happens across your network, and send you alerts if anything suspicious arises. This way, your business will always be ahead and aware of potential danger that may try to infiltrate your defenses, allowing you to act immediately and make sure your business doesn’t become a part of the 51% that annually fall victim to cyber attacks.

How network monitoring will protect your business

Network monitoring software can do a variety of things. First and foremost, it, along with our specialists, will continuously analyze your network’s performance, capture everything that happens within it and generate notifications to update you immediately via email should an issue arise. This feature greatly reduces your risk of downtime.

Affinity IT Group provides a monitoring solution that gives 24×7 visibility into your network, desktops and security performance. Our Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) software service provides real-time analysis of all security alerts and consequently builds a picture of your business technology’s threat landscape. What this does is clearly and immediately put a spotlight on events whenever something fishy occurs. For example, if one of your employees logs into your network at 3:00 PM from your hometown, then logs in again 10 minutes later from a city that’s 5 states away from your hometown, that’s a bit suspicious. With our detection tools, you’ll be alerted to that behavior right away so you can take action before anything dangerous develops.

We’ll also secure your network with firewalls that provide a protective shield around your network. These devices include intrusion detection and prevention tools that quickly detect and stop attempts to harm your network and data by hackers. With  60% of companies failing within six months of a cyber attack and phishing scams costing almost $4 million annually, it’s very important to have solutions like this in place so it doesn’t happen to you.

The monitoring reports generated are also beneficial in helping your business identify patterns and trends in your system’s performance. This helps business owners identify any devices that need upgrades or replacements. It also allows for a more efficient way to reallocate resources to improve productivity.

At Affinity IT Group, we also offer software that monitors the connections to and from a business, provides alerts, and logs activity for historical purposes, so you always have a record of all actions that have taken place. In addition, our software agents can report on the physical conditions of your hardware, such as overheating, fan speed, memory use, processor performance and hard drive health to help prevent unexpected server interruptions.

The best part of all is how this remote network monitoring service eliminates the need for a physical system administrator and daily manual checkups. This saves your company both time and money while addressing your issues efficiently and proactively.

With the abundant amount of danger out there in the IT atmosphere, it’s important that you constantly keep a vigilant eye on your network to protect it. With network monitoring, chances of getting caught off guard by a threat to your business become slim to none. The tools you are provided with will also strengthen your business to the most efficient level it’s ever been. Ready to get started? Contact us today – we’re more than happy to help.