Imagine your organization’s network suddenly goes down, halting operations and causing revenue loss by the minute. While this scenario is unsettling, it goes to show why network troubleshooting skills are essential for today’s IT professionals. The smooth operation of network infrastructure not only supports your organization’s day-to-day operations, but also safeguards against disruptions and downtime.

Effective network monitoring and management are essential for maintaining optimal performance and ensuring business continuity in today’s complex IT environments. One of the key tools for achieving this is the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), which can be used with SNMP polling or SNMP traps.

From reducing risk to optimizing efficiency, your organization has many compelling reasons to enforce policies and procedures. But what happens when a policy hinders productivity more than it helps, causing employees to skirt the rules? For IT departments, this ever-present dilemma is called shadow IT. As cybersecurity risks rise in 2024, it’s more relevant than ever. Before we get into our list of shadow IT statistics, let’s review the basics.

Few contemporary topics have led to greater debate among networking professionals than cloud-based networking and, by extension, cloud-based network monitoring and management solutions. From its niche beginnings with distributed organizations, cloud-based network management has been adopted by organizations ranging from SMB to large, carpeted enterprises. However, traditional on-premise (aka on-prem) solutions persist, helping give customers unprecedented choice when shopping for a solution.

Understanding emerging networking trends is increasingly important for IT professionals and companies of all sizes to stay competitive. The global network infrastructure market is expected to reach $197.8 billion by the end of 2024 and increase to $256 billion by 2028 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.67%. This is a projected $58.2 billion increase in just four years. Staying current with developments in the industry, as well as anticipating where these trends may lead, is vital.

IT leaders are often caught in a tug-of-war between advancing technology and managing costs. In 2024, the state of the economy is only highlighting this divide. For business and IT leaders alike, this begs the common question: how can we reduce IT costs? Demands for IT continue to spike—especially as the cybersecurity landscape shifts and the appetite for remote work increases.

The cornerstone of every successful relationship—business or otherwise—is a clear, mutual set of expectations. In IT, this plays out in the form of service level agreements (SLAs). But really, SLAs are only the first step in the journey to a happy customer relationship. The real key to maintaining happy customers over the long term is SLA management. Knowing how important SLAs are raises several questions: How do you create one, what should it contain, and how do you manage them?

As an MSP, your role is to ensure your client’s network operates without a hitch. Checking the health of their network and sharing your findings in a network assessment report helps you identify potential vulnerabilities so you can fix them sooner rather than later. Creating these reports is a critical part of an MSP’s role, but it’s also a tedious one. That’s why we’ve created a network assessment report template.

Is your network management solution still up to the task? With remote work, cloud adoption, IoT, and more pushing networks to evolve rapidly, reliance on an outdated system risks performance issues, security gaps, insufficient visibility, and increased downtime. But when is it time to upgrade or replace your existing platform?

SaaS discovery is really easy if you’re an end user. You can probably find a product that meets your needs with a Google search and a credit card. However, SaaS discovery from an IT management and governance perspective is a whole different beast. In the past, there haven’t been a lot of easy ways to detect application usage in the browser or restrict user activity without creating hyper-restrictive internet usage policies. Enter SaaS discovery platforms.