Your company is in full expansion, with rising sales and soon it will be necessary to hire more employees, everything is going very well, right? The answer might not be very encouraging if your company does not have a good IT team. This is because company growth, whether in the number of sales, employees, or infrastructure, implicitly brings extra pressure on the system used. When a system receives unplanned extra effort, some problems may arise, such as:
- Servers may restart or become unavailable;
- Your intranet becomes inaccessible;
- Instability in some or all of the systems used;
- Inconsistent information may appear.
Any of the cases above present a risk to the health of your business and can slow down or even completely stop your climb to success. In startup or small companies, this problem can worsen, since the IT department is usually constituted by just one person, who will inevitably not be able to handle the workload.
To bypass this problem and grow without stumbling, it is essential to do your homework, that is, to understand and anticipate problems that may arise.
Identifying potential problem areas
In a network, it is common to have points more vulnerable to the appearance of problems: usually these points are linked to sectors that receive a larger number of accesses or service requests. For example:
- Access;
- Name Resolution and load balancing;
- Web service and application layer;
- Processing layer;
- Database management.
No matter the system used, if your infrastructure was not designed to support the required demand, errors, delays, or inconsistencies will soon begin to appear.
But how to anticipate these problems? One solution is to invest in network monitoring tools, such as the Monitoring Appliance. They provide valuable information that will help you find areas most susceptible to failures before they compromise service availability.
It is also possible to create simulations and diagnostics on practically everything in your system. For example, you can simulate a slowdown on your website caused by excess users. In this case, an alternative would be to insert another web server. However, this will crash your database, making this solution unviable and showing that the database is also vulnerable because it does not accept multiple servers. This battery of assumptions and tests ensures that you find the problem before your user encounters it.
In the worst case scenario, when it is not possible to find a solution in a timely manner, knowing that a problem exists allows administrators to create a communication channel with users informing them about the measures to be taken, which will certainly mitigate user dissatisfaction.
Cloud maintenance
Another challenge to be overcome by IT teams is providing support for cloud servers. How to provide support for something external to your environment? Cloud providers have the advantage of being more reliable, however, it is worth remembering that even they are subject to failures. Cloud servers usually have shared services, which means that bandwidth peaks will be hit several times, causing slowdowns that directly affect application performance.
A very useful way out, which also uses monitoring tools, is to create a diagram and send it to your server support. The diagram will inform the supplier’s support team that the problem is on their end.
When it comes to information networks, these problems and solutions are just the tip of the iceberg.
