Techy Turmoil: What to Do When your Business Network Goes Down

For business owners, adversity is a daily event. Many people hope that everything will run smoothly in their business, but such is rarely the case. Anything could happen, and you have to do your best to be prepared for things that you might not even be able to imagine today. One of the biggest hang-ups for businesses in the modern age is technology on the fritz. Since most businesses have some sort of internal network set up, a small problem can occasionally spread or affect much more than the one computer it starts with.

Learning what to do when your network experiences issues can help you keep a level head if this happens to you, and can help you save a considerable amount of both time and money when attempting to fix the issue. With that in mind, here are a few tips you can fall back on.

Identification

First and foremost, it is important to find out where the problem is coming from. Just like treating the symptoms of a disease won’t cure it, troubleshooting the problems you can obviously see won’t always fix your IT problem. What you want to do is check to see if the network is just down in one office or floor or if it is affecting everyone, including WAN and remote users. Isolated network issues like the ones that affect one office might be due to a problem with uplink connections.

Wide network problems are usually linked to the “core” of the system. Getting an idea of the scope of the issue can help you narrow down the places you need to start looking in. If possible, you should isolate the affected area to keep any of your attempted fixes from causing trouble on the rest of the network.

Network Nuisance

The next thing you want to do is have someone perform the Ping Test. This test helps you determine if you actually have a network problem or not. Sometimes users have connectivity but do not have access to any of the applications within a network. This is telling you that the problem actually lies with the servers or even the apps and not the network. Knowing that can save you a lot of time spent checking network connections and restarting your machines hoping the problem will resolve itself.

Now, those who find that users cannot connect to the network at all generally have a problem with the actual network itself. Most of the time, network issues like these have something to do with a firewall, but this is just one example. A temporary fix would be to have the employee or employees who can’t connect to the network try to work from different locations that still have network access while you sort out the issue.

Work with Professionals

You are running a business, and while your network is a vital aspect of that it often will take more time to maintain than you can dedicate to it personally. When you run into issues, you need to make sure that you are able to tackle them as quickly as possible to get your network up and running again as soon as possible. For some, there simply isn’t time in the day to handle all the other aspects of running a business and troubleshoot tech issues. For others, the knowledge simply isn’t there – and the middle of a crisis is not the right time to learn.

A good solution to both of these situations is to make sure you have an IT team ready to help you figure out this problem. Ottawa IT companies can not only get to the root of the problem quickly and solve it, but they should also be able to offer tips to reduce the chances of this happening again.  Retaining an IT professional or having a company on-call to work with when you experience issues can make a huge difference in your ability to efficiently handle those problems.

Plan for the Worst

Your customers will not always understand this type of problem. It is important that you continue working through this crisis if you can. You may be limited, but you should have a backup system working by using a backup network. This is just a temporary solution, but it may help. You should also make sure that you have backups of all the information within your network just in case it needs to be restored, which sometimes forces all data to be erased.

Hopefully, some of these steps help you restart your network successfully. Remember, to have a detailed plan for everything in the future, including how to deal with something like this.