Every business wants to grow with time. If your business is consistently growing with time, then you can easily attract new talent and investors. Also, consistent business growth will help you in improving your profits. You will have a breathing room during emergencies. If your business has thousands of clients, then losing one client won’t matter much to you. However, if you have only 50 clients, then every client matters to you. Many companies think that growth is all about adding new employees and clients. But, you have to also your operations with time. In a modern business environment, this generally means that you should have network scalability. In this article, we are going to talk about the importance of network scalability.

Why Network Scalability is important for your business?

Scalability simply measures how easily you can upscale or downscale your operations. Network scalability simply means how easy you can remove or add network bandwidth. It refers to how easily you can increase the capacity of your systems. This will ensure that you can keep up with the increased demands. Network scalability is important for your business due to these reasons:

Network scalability will ensure that you can meet the increased demands.
If your business growth will outpace your network capacity, then your clients will face disruptions. Due to this, many clients will move to other platforms. It is important to ensure that you are maintaining high availability as it will help you in keeping your customers happy.
If you are facing less demand during the off-season, then you can downscale your network for reducing your IT costs.

In simple words, IT flexibility is very important for modern businesses. If your network is flexible, then you can easily meet your customer demands. This will help you in controlling costs and avoiding service disruptions.

How to Test Network Scalability?

You can do scalability testing for testing the scalability of your network. This method will help you in testing your IT systems at the minimum and maximum capacities. Your team can modify your systems for ensuring that they can meet the projected growth. This testing can occur at the database, hardware, and software level. Thus, your developers can work on ensuring that your systems are scalable after the maximum load.

Scalability Testing will help you in assessing the following elements:

Network Usage: Scalability Testing will help you in measuring your bandwidth consumption. It is the measure of data that your resources are consuming. If your apps are using excessive network bandwidth, then it will lead to various problems. It can affect the performance of your apps. Apps that use too much bandwidth are very difficult to scale.
Request Throughput: It is the measure of requests that your database, application, and server can handle. This will determine the number of simultaneous users that can use your network assets.
Server Response Time: It will help you in measuring the time your applications take to respond to a request. If your applications have shorter response times, then your users will have a better experience as they can quickly get your services.

Running scalability tests

It is also very easy to conduct these scalability tests. However, you might need access to special tools for conducting these tests. Also, you should create a secondary environment. This will ensure that your users can do their work during the testing phase.

Create a list of network attributes you want to test: You should first determine the network attributes that you want to test. Also, you should ensure that everyone is using the same metric during the test.
Network Testing Tools: There are various tools available in the market that will help you in testing your network scalability. You should also find a secondary production environment for the testing process. Your cloud provider or data center can help you in setting up a secondary environment.
Set up different network scenarios: Testing tools will help you in setting up different network scenarios and you can choose between high, medium, and low loads. This will help you in testing the stability and performance of your network.
Check your Result: Make sure that you have access to a detailed record of all the network tests. Your IT team can analyze these records for identifying issues in your network. Thus, these reports are very important for your network. These reports will also help you in prioritizing the different aspects of your network performance. This will ensure that you can easily scale up your network in the future.

How to maintain Legacy Systems?

The best thing about cloud computing platforms is that it ensures that you can scale your business network. Most businesses are already using cloud platforms. Thus, they can easily downscale or upscale their network infrastructure. You can just contact your cloud vendor and ask them to increase your cloud application spend. However, not every business can do this.

Many businesses are still using legacy systems and applications. Most legacy systems are only compatible with specific architectures and OS. Thus, it is very difficult to move these systems to the cloud platform.

Legacy systems can hurt your network scalability. However, you can follow some tips for dealing with these legacy systems:

You should check if it is possible to migrate your legacy systems to the cloud platforms. If it is possible to move your legacy systems, then you should move them to the cloud.
You should audit your existing IT assets. This will help you in identifying all the important network elements.
You should replace some of your network elements before moving to a new data center.
You should consider upgrading your outdated systems. It is a good idea to go with modern systems as they are compatible with the latest technologies like big data and cloud computing.

Conclusion

These are some tips that will help you in improving your network scalability. The best way to ensure network scalability is by working with a cloud vendor. Experienced MSPs like Bleuwire can help you in moving your applications to the cloud. Thus, you don’t need to worry about handling the cloud migration process. Also, they will help you in handling your network infrastructure. They will ensure that you can easily upscale or downscale your network. If you need more tips regarding network management, then you can contact Bleuwire.

Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™ services and solutions in how we can help your business.