Have you ever noticed that no matter how many traffic lanes you add, crowded streets will always be crowded? It’s one of those strange facts of life. More roads inevitably bring more cars.
Chances are, this isn’t first time you’ve heard a comparison between your company’s network connectivity and roads — between the information superhighway and the commuter not-so-super highway. But think about that comparison in terms of bandwidth.
No matter what your network capabilities and bandwidth, your company can probably find ways to push their limits. Just think about it for a second: Why are sites like Hulu, Netflix and YouTube exploding in popularity? Sure, they’re getting more and more content all the time. But more importantly, more and more people are getting access to quick Internet at home. When you’re using a slow computer, do you twiddle your thumbs for several minutes waiting for a video to load, or do you move on to something else? It certainly is a lot more tempting to download a program when the video loads almost instantaneously.
So here’s the bottom line: Most people don’t worry about bandwidth until they have performance issues. And if they don’t have performance issues, they’ll place demands on the system until they do. That’s just the simple truth about how most users behave.
And that’s why purchasing more bandwidth whenever your company experiences network problems or transfers too much data will never permanently solve your problem.
Meeting your company’s tech needs can’t just be about buying employees computers with sufficient RAM, or having enough storage space on the network to save all the company’s data, or delivering Internet services that are fast enough to meet user demands.
In order to make sure that your company’s technological needs are actually being met, there is simply no excuse for a lassiez-faire approach. If a company is running processes such as online backup or file conversion during the day when it could be running them during non-business hours, it may be using twice the resources necessary. If there are no filters on a company’s Internet, some employees could be (innocently or not) dramatically slowing down other employees’ access.
So, if you think you don’t have enough bandwidth, be sure to make sure you’re being smart about the way you use your current bandwidth. If you just buy more bandwidth every time you’re running out, you’ll only find yourself buying it more and more often. The better solution: Manage what you have.