The holidays are over. Our lives can return to normal. And our parking lots.
Ever notice how December is about the only time you see a full parking lot at the big box stores. Most of the year, those sprawling parking lots seldom reach 50 percent of their capacity.
It’s not just hapless planning on the part of those stores that leads to this phenomenon. The number of people who will be in a grocery store on a Thursday evening in January isn’t a huge mystery. Based on the population and socioeconomics of an area, with some adjustments for location and competition, planners can get a pretty good idea of how many customers to expect.
But businesses don’t build their parking lots based on Thursday night traffic. Why? Because they know that a full parking lot at other times of the year could lead customers to another store. So they build accordingly.
Now think about that parking-lot phenomenon in IT terms. Whether you are starting a new business or reevaluating the IT demands on your existing one, think about the bandwidth requirements you’re going to need during the year ahead. You don’t need to manage it like a parking lot, necessarily, with an enormous amount of space that is seldom used. But it helps to ask yourself a few questions about the year ahead: Are there times of the year when your business needs additional bandwidth? Do you anticipate special events when you’ll either have more users on the system, or applications such as live video streaming that bog down your bandwidth?
If so, think about the IT strategy you want to employ during those occasions. What you don’t want to have happen is Black Friday-level traffic on a system that is equipped for a Thursday night lull.
There are a number of strategies to handle the ups and downs of business bandwidth. And there are ways to optimize the existing bandwidth you have. But those strategies are best executed with planning. If you need some help, we’d be happy to help you find the best solution.