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How a proactive approach to Wi-Fi management saves your business time and money
Prevention is the best medicine when it comes to your health – and the health of your Wi-Fi network is no exception.
In today’s connected workplace, wireless devices are mission critical to the success of a business, whether they’re delivering data that saves lives in hospitals, ensuring smooth merchandise transactions in retail, or monitoring logistics in manufacturing. Every business owner needs the wireless experience they provide for their end users to be fast, reliable, and secure.
But too many businesses are stuck in a never-ending cycle of reactive Wi-Fi testing – scrambling to diagnose and fix problems only after something goes terribly wrong.
With this traditional approach – also known as a “break-fix solution” – frustrating downtime is a common occurrence because no one touches your network until a problem is reported. Then you’re locked in a race against time to get your business back online before the situation spirals out of control.
Further complicating matters is the lack of familiarity with your company’s network this solution entails – forcing you to test every possible situation to find the source of your trouble. This needle-in-a-haystack search might potentially involve your Internet provider, a power outage, an internal wiring issue, a spotty connection, and so much more. Not only does this process waste time and money, but it leaves room for potential human error.
Network Computing magazine reports that the average company suffers five downtime events every month – incurring total costs of $1 million a year for a midsize business and more than $60 million a year for a large enterprise. Nearly 80 percent of the hit to your bottom line comes from lost employee productivity, followed by lost revenue and the actual costs of fixing the problem.
Why proactive testing cuts costs
Fortunately, there’s a way to break this frustrating and costly cycle: proactive Wi-Fi testing. Unlike reactive tests or routine preventative maintenance, proactive testing is a constant, rigorous inspection of your Wi-Fi network that detects and helps resolve issues before they’re evident to users. The data that’s collected gives you a continuous, real-time status of what’s happening on your network, enabling you to maintain a stable and secure environment without the downtime associated with strictly reactive solutions.
Proactive testing is the preferred method among businesses that are painfully aware of just how much network downtime costs them. They understand that assuming the predictable cost of this strategic management tool is a bargain when weighed against the heavy, unexpected expense of emergency Wi-Fi intervention – and the staggering costs of even a single hour of company downtime.
7SIGNAL’s performance management platform continuously monitors and tests your wireless network for performance issues – maximizing network uptime, device connectivity, and network ROI. It stands out from other solutions on the market by measuring Wi-Fi performance from the client’s point of view – instead of from a central controller out to the clients – and providing data that isn’t tracked by your Wireless LAN vendor.
7SIGNAL employs user experience testing that continuously simulates real-world Wi-Fi network usage. This enables it to experience true Wi-Fi performance throughout the day and night and send instant alerts when conditions are right for problems to occur, such as an access point that stopped beaconing or throughput that’s dropped below a critical level in a particular service area.
7SIGNAL also consistently conducts passive tests that “listen” to the interactions taking place between clients and access points, measuring clients’ success in using the network and the quality of their experiences.
Together, these proactive tests measure key performance indicators such as throughput and latency, as well as the jitter that leads to poor VoIP system call quality. They enable you to drill down and analyze non-performing areas to discover the root cause of WLAN issues and receive suggestions for improving network performance.
6 benefits for your business
Here are six ways proactive testing integrates with 7SIGNAL’s performance management platform to benefit your business:
- Visibility of Wi-Fi performance. Proactive testing helps you solve problems before helpdesk calls are made and meet global Wi-Fi performance service level agreements (SLAs) across your network.
- Improve end user Wi-Fi experience. Customers report 50 to 100 percent improvement in baseline network performance after the data 7SIGNAL collects is used to optimize their network.
- Reduce troubleshooting as much as 90 percent. The unprecedented visibility of 7SIGNAL’s solution into end-user experiences eases troubleshooting – especially at remote locations - and isolates device and operating system issues from Wi-Fi and network problems.
- Minimize risk of service disruption. Test results reduce the risk of error by enabling you to make informed, fact-based decisions to resolve issues, and then validate the impact of changes you make.
- Slash operational costs. Catching problems before they evolve into emergency issues drastically reduce support calls and shortens the mean time of repairs – allowing you to scale the network and support it with fewer staff.
- Plan meaningful future upgrades. Avoid premature upgrades and the disruption they cause with real data that proves whether they’re truly needed.
The least expensive Wi-Fi issues are those that never trigger helpdesk calls because they are detected, diagnosed, and resolved before they impact your business. It’s time to exchange the high costs and stress of reactive testing for an exceptional Wi-Fi performance management system that identifies issues before users do.
7SIGNAL offers Wi-Fi performance management solutions that ensure connectivity issues don’t disrupt productivity. Contact us to learn more.