Is Your Network Prepared to Reopen?

As businesses across Massachusetts start to reopen over the next weeks and months, it’s important to be aware of the health of your IT infrastructure as you start to come back into the office. Things are going to be different moving forward, and you may need to adjust your network in order to handle it.

Is Your Wireless Network Ready for Social Distancing?

Businesses will need to reconfigure their spaces to accommodate social distancing, keeping people 6 feet apart from each other whenever possible. This might mean having staff occupy places in the office that wouldn’t normally be suited for a workstation and might not have a network drop.

Fortunately, high-speed wireless networks are a great temporary solution for this, and as long as your Wi-Fi network can sustain the bandwidth and handle the number of users connecting to it, you should be able to get by. Now is the time to invest in a high-speed internet consultation to determine exactly what your needs are.

If your Wi-Fi network is a little older or not properly maintained, or it hasn’t been audited in a while, now is the time to get that done. It’s going to be much less of a headache to take a look at it now than have to diagnose issues while your staff is struggling to catch up. Don’t wait to schedule a free IT consultation.

Some things to think about - if you are moving people and workstations around the office to accommodate your employees and customers, you’ll want to consider the number of devices that are suddenly joining the wireless network, the signal strength of where each device is going, potential interference, and even the security of the network overall. If your business is in close proximity to other companies, it’s important to remember that others will be trying to connect to Wi-Fi as well, and if your network isn’t locked down, you could be openly inviting a lot of trouble onto your network.

One thing to consider is that if you don’t take care of your Wi-Fi issues, your team will. The bane of many businesses is shadow IT, which if not accounted for, can increase the risk of your data being compromised. We specialize in optimizing wireless networks and perform Wireless Site Surveys for our clients to help them maintain secure, stable wireless connectivity throughout their entire workspace.

To learn more about the official reopening of Massachusetts, check out
www.mass.gov/reopening.

To learn more about how to make changes or preparations to your network, or to talk about how to get the most out of your IT, give Datalyst a call at (774) 213-9701.