4 Ways to Streamline & Secure Business Networks

Fast, reliable connectivity is essential for businesses, but ensuring connections are now secure 24/7 is equally, if not more, important—especially since 91% of breaches start from a single phishing attack and 1-4 employees admit to clicking a suspicious link. So, the question stands...

‍How can businesses ensure fast, secure connections?

As global technology integrators, we’re often asked: “What’s a quick, effective strategy for businesses trying to safeguard and boost their connections?” When combing new technologies, it’s critical to know which technologies complement each other without being redundant to your network and budget.

It’s also highly suggested to use a single source provider so you can proactively manage and monitor solutions all at once. For example, discover how the following 4 solutions can work collectively to ensure businesses stay alert and productive when deployed correctly.

‍1. Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS)  

Enterprise MPLS prioritizes network traffic, letting teams ensure critical applications and devices have optimal speed. Effective solutions should also provide full-mesh connectivity between customer locations, data centers, and cloud services, and options should include managed and unmanaged CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) and enable different classes of service, including:

MPLS Classes of Service

• Voice
• Video

‍ Scavenger (nonbusiness traffic)

• General data
• Business data
• Critical business data

‍Tech Tip: For better results, businesses should utilize bandwidth between 1Mbps to 60Gbps and Robust Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to secure service availability and address latency, packet loss, and jitter issues.

‍2. Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS)

With the current demand for hybrid and remote options, the ability to develop new flexible models is essential. Bringing UCaaSinto the picture provides business collaboration and communication tools in an integrated platform to ensure consistent information delivery to staff. Use UCaaS to increase productivity and keep employees engaged while ensuring a secure team environment no matter where.  

Tech Tip: Businesses should deploy an OPEX model to help cut costs, raise security and availability, and effectively support remote locations on a single platform.

3. Managed Secure Business Internet (MSBI)  

By integrating a security-centric model, businesses can use MSBI to help mitigate the risk of unauthorized access and provide insights into the impact of vulnerabilities in networks. This helps build a robust cybersecurity framework that combines a next-generation firewall, VPN, and scalable security layers with intelligence, compliance, information governance, and data protection capabilities.  

Unified Threat Management (UTM) furthers security and saves teams’ budgets by adding scalable layers of security and focusing on what teams genuinely need to stay safe.

‍Scalable Unified Threat Management Features:

• Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)
• Web filtering
• Antivirus
• Antispam
• Application control

‍Tech Tip: A dedicated business internet solution providing a Global Network Operations Center (GNOC) can help businesses rest even easier with eyes on suspicious activity and vulnerabilities 24/7.

‍4. Network Management  

A reliable network management team is essential during serious downtime or system crashes. To ensure data/devices are backed up at all times, teams should utilize high-redundancy dual access/CPE & wireless failover to automatically re-route traffic to an active network via a redundant access circuit and intelligent routing protocols (e.g., border gateway protocol with bi-directional forwarding detection.)

Combine Solutions to Secure Business Connections

Combining/tailoring solutions to specific business networks almost always increases the value and safety of your system architecture.

• A robust MPLS solution prioritizes traffic and enhances connections through different service levels to provide teams and customers with a higher-quality experience.
• Adding UCaaS supports on-net voice, VoIP, off-net voice access, and centralized SIP trunking to support staff from anywhere.
• For cybersecurity, most enterprises typically turn to Managed Secure Business Internet to cost-effectively scale UTM features and GNOC and help ensure data is safe 24/7.
• Back up servers using dedicated Network Management that monitors activity and has data and applications running in no time after an incident.

Alone, these four solutions work to serve essential business functions. But together, these compiled solutions are also prime examples of how technology can collaborate to provide business systems with a cost-effective method to manage, protect, and speed up services.

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