Don’t Test Employee Patience with Poor Network Health

According to Gartner, hybrid work is here to stay. While this presents its own set of challenges for HR professionals to keep their employees happy, the onus is put on network and IT teams to ensure the company’s remote network operates both seamlessly and securely.

This blog will address how poor network health is a liability for both employee satisfaction and productivity along with solutions that improve network health and security to prevent outages.

Impacts of Poor Network Performance. In a survey examining common network interruptions organizations face, respondents said the average cost of network downtime may be greater than organizations expect – 83% of respondents said brownouts caused serious damage network in both dollars and productivity, noting that the average cost of network downtime from a brownout is nearly as drastic as an outage.

Moreover, more than 70% of respondents surveyed said a decline in employee productivity was the greatest loss their organizations faced due to brownouts. Overall, respondents claimed IT teams weren’t aware of more than 60% of network brownouts because some alarm systems didn’t detect these interruptions. Customers and employees discovered around 40% of brownouts while 14% went unreported. Respondents also reported that brownouts increasingly frustrated end-users and employees.

Employees rely on technology to do their jobs. In a workplace productivity study 92% of employees said having technology that helps them do their job efficiently affects their work satisfaction. But endless manual tasks with less manpower combined with difficulties keeping up with network best practices inevitably leads to configuration errors, failures in patch management, upgrades that fall behind, and inconsistent network backups. The demand for network management teams to consistently deliver services and maintain a secure posture in hybrid environments is only increasing, as is employee dissatisfaction when technology that helps get their jobs done fails.

Monetary Damage. The annual monetary cost of network downtime from brownouts ranged from $250,000 to $700,000 in losses, with an average cost of $600,000 per organization. The main reason for the losses was organizations’ inability to proactively prevent and detect problems or quickly resolve problems after they’ve occurred.

How Backbox’s Network Security Automation Solution Improves Network Health and Keeps Employees Happy

Diagnostics. Backbox’s Network Security Automation Solution supports preemptive health checks on the network to prevent problems and verify proper operations before an issue affects the network. The best solutions come with a predefined signature set that checks the health of your systems and ensure uniformity and consistency of all configurations.

Network Visualization. It often takes days to weeks for the most skilled IT professionals to locate a problem deep within the network. Having a bird’s eye view, like BackBox’s Network Visualization tool, enables IT teams to automatically grab network information, such as routing and IP data, and draw a network map according to it. Such maps give users real-time, full visibility into the network without the need to use manual drawings or conduct specific, limited scanning. From this map, the user tracks routes across network assets, see backup statuses of devices and even open a terminal window to the devices appearing in the map. A network visualization tool allows IT teams to spot brownouts when they happen, allowing for a quicker response time and a reduction in support tickets from annoyed employees.

Automate Patch Management. Automation helps network teams to execute key tasks consistently and effectively while preventing disruptions. With BackBox’s Network Security Automation Solution, teams view upgrades across vendors through a single pane of glass and customize upgrade flows to meet an organization’s needs as they evolve. By automating routine operating system upgrades, network teams no longer have to spend countless hours manually upgrading devices across their organization, all while ensuring the upgrades are successfully completed without service disruption.

While employee happiness is dependent on many factors, an environment where employees focus on their work without disruptions plays a key role in job satisfaction. If you are interested in learning how BackBox’s Network Security Automation tool can improve your network health, visit here to book a demo.