What makes a Business Network Professional

In this episode of Act on Tech, Alex  explores the mindset, responsibilities, and standards that define professional network administration in a business environment. From reliability and documentation to security, planning, and preventative maintenance, you'll learn why business networking is about far more than getting an internet connection to work.

Whether you're a small business owner looking to hire an IT provider or an aspiring IT professional wanting to raise your standards, this episode explains what professionalism really looks like in today's connected world.

Because at Alex Custom Tech, IT means Integrity & Trust.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Are you ready to make technology work for you? Tune in to Act on Tech, the podcast where we break down the latest tech trends and show you how to boost your productivity at home and in your business. So subscribe to Act on Tech today and visit alexcustomtech.com to see how we can take your business to the next level. That's Act on Tech, your guide to smarter tech for a smarter business. Alex Custom Tech, IT means integrity and trust.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Hello, hi, welcome to Act on Tech. I'm Alex of Alex Custom Tech. And today's episode is called What Makes a Business Network Professional. And the reason why I'm talking about this today is because I've been doing a lot of networking, a lot of networking in the last couple of weeks. And I bought some equipment, I've made a lot of trips to Microcenter, and I started to think about this on my own because I know I've done a lot of podcasts in the past about networks and prosumer routers and Unify. And I think I mentioned TP Link. I think I talked to you guys also about the uh the ban that the US government is doing with uh firewalls now. And I want to talk to you guys about what makes the networks different, a home network from a professional business network, small business or enterprise. And this is my my take on it from my experience, and it's not an elitist or um it's not an elitist look, it's just a simple look at it, right? So it's gonna break it down in different different sections and I'm gonna tell you the things that I think about and how I approach things and why I do what I do and how and how important I I see it. So a lot of small businesses start out, you know, they start out when I start they open the doors for the first time out when they're deciding to do something or when they started doing it, they might start doing it from home, right? And uh they start out with whatever internet the ISP or their service provider give them, or whatever comes in the box, or whatever the guy takes off the truck and give to them, and you know, basic router from Comcast Verizon Spectrum, you know, honestly and honestly, for a while, because again, like I said, even with me, I started Alice Custom Tech for a while, that works fine. But what starts to happen, or what but what happens eventually if the business you keep doing your entrepreneurial thing and you keep doing what you gotta do, what eventually happens is that you add more and more and more devices, and and when I say devices, I'm talking maybe security cameras for the house or for the building you're in. You know, you install that, you bring somebody in, they install that a couple cameras, maybe five, six, seven cameras. Maybe you get some employees, another employee get a couple more computers. Maybe the employees start working from a remote location, so maybe they're not even in the same country, they're working from another place, and they're helping you to some kind of collaboration going on there. You set up some kind of VPN, right? Um, now you have to start having a phone system between them and you, and maybe you have more employees. You're talking about VoIP now, um, voiceover IP phone system, and that had to be integrated into your network, and suddenly things start to slow down, suddenly you start to notice things different from when you just got it, right? And it becomes unreliable and it becomes difficult to manage, right? So today I want to break down right um what actually separates a professional business professional network from a typical home network, not an advanced home network, a typical home network, and why it matters and why most people should really realize this or think about this. So, a professional network is built for stability. So when I say, and this is the first part we're gonna talk about, a professional network is built for stability. So when I go into a business, I'm looking around at the users and what it what devices they have, and and you know how big the building is, how much coverage do they need, Wi-Fi-wise. I look at I take all those things into consideration, and everything I'm thinking about, I gotta also think about this, it has to be up all the time, and this has to be reliable. So those are the two goals that I'm trying to the two goals that I'm trying to do. That's what I'm mean to go for that on top of that, and you have your security. So it has to be built for stability, right? So the biggest difference between a home and a home network and a business professional network is the reliability, right? A home network of internet goes on for like 20 minutes, it's annoying, right? You're annoyed by it. But when a internet goes on in a business that costs money, and this is kind of where I beat the drum all the time when I say you guys gotta call either either me or some other MSP to mitigate this risk, right? So a professional network is designed to stay stable on the load, it's the key. Stable on the load, that means better routers, better switches, better Wi-Fi access points, proper cabling, and proper configuration. So I'm gonna touch on some of these a little bit, right? So when I say better Wi-Fi, I mean when I say better router, it's not gonna be the one that came off the truck from Comcast or Verizon or Spectrum, it's gonna be a business router or a business firewall, something that's probably rock mounted, right? That can get the hell beat out of it, and it just shakes it off like nothing, right? Because of all the traffic and the different kinds of traffic that's coming to it, right? When I say better switch, it's a CM concept, something that's more likely rock mounted, doesn't have to be, but something that's rock mounted and it can take the beating of a lifetime, it just shakes it off, it can hang us it, right? Better Wi-Fi access point. This is a little bit different, this requires a little bit of a nuance. Better Wi-Fi access point is yeah, talk about what is the square foot, what are the things your people are gonna be going from as far as within that within that you know area. Do they need access? How far from the building do they need access? Are they gonna be on the road? Um, that's a different topic. So, again, but in when they're in the building and they're moving around with with wireless devices, it has to be reliable. You need a certain kind of Wi-Fi setup for that, and the cabling, of course, you know, we want a consistent cabling, you don't want any bottlenecks in the cabling, so you want to have like Cat 6 throughout the building, ports CAT6, wires of CAT6, you know, and proper configuration. What ecosystem you're gonna be on, what network you're gonna be doing, you're gonna be using Jupyter switches or Cisco switches, or or you're gonna be using my favorite Unify or TP Link, right? So a professional equipment is designed to run continuously for years while handling dozens or even hundreds of devices, right? A consumer router might work great for streaming Netflix and just browsing the web, right? But it can't, it's gonna start to struggle if you have phone to it and cameras and TV and tablets and printers and workstations and cloud backup and remote users, you'll start to see it become a little bit sluggish because it's not built for that, it's not built for hundred users. And remember, and I think I told you guys this from before, right? Now we're doing now we're doing the internet of things, and if each one of the little things you put in your house, little light switches and all this sort of stuff, that's um you know IP addresses, and that's gonna hit your router. So again, it's different between a business router, a business firewall, than a home firewall. So if you think about that, right now the next thing I want to talk about is the segmentation and VLANs. So segmentation is not necessarily VLANs, virtual lens, because you can do segmentation physically, and I don't one of the things I talk about when I talk about IT, people just run off and say VLANs, VLAN, VLAN, VLANs, and VLANs is awesome because I use VLANs, but you can segment your network physically without the VLANs, too. That's been done before, right? It's just that VLANs is just way better because it has instead of having a switch for each segmentation, you can have one switch, and within the switch you can segment things and it save you and power and and that kind of stuff, but there is a way to segment the network with each switch, okay? Because I've done that, I've clients that I have to do that for, you know. So, again, it's there's two ways to do it, okay. Now, when we talk about segmentation, what this means is let me kind of give you like an example of what we're talking about or kind of like explain it to you so you understand what I'm coming from. But when I talk about segmentation, so one of the biggest signs of a professional network is the segmentation, right? And this means that separating different types of traffic, types of traffic, right? For example, office computers are on one network, guess Wi-Fi on another, security cameras on another network, smart TV or IoT devices are on another network, and your VoIP, your voice or IP is on another network. So say you do it physically, you will have a switch for computers, a switch for the access points, a switch for these security cameras, a switch for all your smart TVs and IoT devices, and then switch for the phones. If you're doing VLANs, you can have one switch and you can separate sections or multiple ports for each of these networks. That's how VLAN works, right? And this is done mostly with VLANs off late, right? Now VLANs help improve security, performance, organizing things, and troubleshooting because all in one place, and you can you can look and check on the ports and and do that's what I do. And for example, if you start, if if a smart device gets compromised, this is what happens with the with the segmentation. If a smart device gets compromised, they can't attack anything else, it only can attack what's on the computer on that line with that small device, right? People use a lot of one network for everything, they throw everything into one network, and then so once they get into one device, they can get into any other device on the network, and that's where the security and cybercrime and all this other stuff take place, and that's why you don't want to have a network that's not segmentated, especially since you have a lot of devices in your house now that is managed by the cloud or some other organization in China, God knows where the hell it is. It's sending and receiving information from somebody you don't know or you don't you can't control, right? So that's your segmentation that's very important, right? So let's talk about professional Wi-Fi, the difference from home Wi-Fi. So many people think better Wi-Fi means that stronger signal, that's not really what better Wi-Fi is, but professional Wi-Fi is about coverage, talk about that earlier. Coverage, roaming, talk about we're gonna talk about that a little bit more. Um, capacity, management, and scalability. So when you talk about coverage, you want to be able to cover the whole um facility, the whole campus, right? So anywhere people go that works at that particular place have coverage with their with their mobile device. Rooming is where mesh network comes into play. So you have all these you have 5, 10, 15 access points, but the person only see one or only logs on to one broadcast or one Wi-Fi ID or Wi-Fi name if you if you want to speak your colloquial language, right? Capacity, how much device can be added to this access point. You want to be you want to be able to handle that, right? And management, I management, manage IT people or you or whoever is monitoring this team to be able to see all the access points, have access to them and see what's connected to them. And the scalability you should be able to add more if you need to add more, right? In a professional environment, access points are strategically places. So I talk about that. Come and look around and do an assessment, they gotta look and see where the best place for them to go. Strategically places to manage that means that users can move throughout the building, of course, without constantly getting disconnected. Also that the network can handle as many users as it needs to, right? So device performance is important, signal strength is important, interference. You don't want to be interfering with it, is important and use in usage patterns. You want to be able to look for things, right? Now let's talk about security and the major difference between a home and a business. So security for professional business is built on the mindset, like I tell you talk about it before. So this includes firewall rules, VPN access, right, multi-factor authentication, network segmentation, right? Dns filtering and firmware management and manage monitor alert. So this is kind of where you get your MSP comes into play here. Firewall rules, you want to allow things into your network and block things, right? VPN access. Who has access to your VPN and what they have access to when they get into the VPN, right? Multi-factor authentication, nobody should be able to flag in number password or no, you need some other step to be able to get access, right? Network segmentation. We talked about that. You separate your segment your network, so if anything is compromised, it doesn't spread to the whole entire network, right? You want to have that DNS filtering. This is a good one. Of other companies of DNS filtering, so like when people go on their computers and the in the office on the network and they try to go to chat GPT or Google or YouTube, you can either allow that or not. So you can say no chat GPT or no croc and no YouTube or no, and it's on that side filters what they're doing. You can, you know, that's the difference. Home don't well, homes normally don't have that. Okay, firmware management, you want to be able to manage and be able to update all your computer from a central location, right? This is where MSPs come into again, right? And monitoring alerts, MSPs will see these alerts, they will see because they're monitoring the traffic on a daily basis, they'll see when something pings and shouldn't be there, or or you know, the rules would set up things that okay, we got this traffic here, it looks suspicious. Hey, look at this, and it would bring attention to a particular IP address, a particular device, right? Now, a lot of this, a lot of, I mean, a lot of unfortunately, that's all I want to say. Unfortunately, a lot of attack often target small businesses, especially because of the one flat network thing they got going on there, and and they don't they don't think that they're gonna be attacked because they're too small, they're gonna attack you know Walmart or or or Amazon, they're not gonna attack me, and then that's the problem because they attack you because Walmart and Amazon is a little bit harder because they have an in-house IT people that is doing this on a regular basis, but you have a flat network and only and it's routed from 15 years ago that Verizon gave you, so you are perfect, and so that's what happens. That's the difference between network with that, between a professional network, and so I'm gonna try to go into the try this was this one. I might you know what I might do uh a continuation of this, um like a part two, because it's a lot of material, and I was really thinking about this, and I was like, Well, I mean you need to to really cover this and kind of give you guys an idea of what MSPs really do and how they benefit you. This is kind of I publish what my side this will probably be the segment or the one a series that I'm doing about MSPs and what they really do. But let's take on one more, let's take on one more, right? So management and visibility, right? So another thing that makes a network different professionally from a home one is a professional setup allows you to see connect connected devices, right? Monitor traffic, detect issues, manage updates, and troubleshoot remotely, which is kind of where I come into play, right? So that's important because modern business depends on heavily, or maybe I should say they depend heavily on technology, so they need it, right? So it breaking is not it's not good, it's it's costly, right? It really shows up on the on on the spreadsheet. So you need to have you need to be able to identify the issues quickly before it's cascading to something else, so without visibility or troubleshooting becomes a guesswork type of thing, or again, what I'm getting lately is people calling me when things are too late, right? So we want to be able to head this off at the pass and have someone in there already doing this, so even if something does break, he's already on top of it. You're not you're not gonna be down a day or two days, you might be down a couple of hours or an hour. That's a big difference, right? So we're not gonna go any further. Well, I think I could think I could go a little bit further. I got more time, right? So, next one planning matters. This is kind of where I this is a good thing and a bad thing about my personality. I'm always planning and planning more than I execute. So, one thing people often overlook is the is that professional networks are not just thrown together, they are planned, right? So, a good network design is future growth, it takes into consideration future growth, device count, Wi-Fi coverage, internet usage, security requirement, remote access, and backup strategies. Now, when you're designing, when I'm designing a network, I always design it in a hybrid way, and I always design it so that you can add things to it all later. That's good for me. And if and when I hasn't really happened a lot, and if it happens, it it kind of reverses itself. But say I got a client, right? And I initially set up their network, and for whatever reason, they decide to go with someone else, right? When that guy comes in, I've never heard anyone come in and say, Oh, it's just a messed up network, and and and I don't know where it's documentation or not, it never happens, right? They come in, they just come right in and pick up where I left off because everything is just there and it's just and and any IT person can pick up where I left off without any re any real problems. Now what normally happens and not gonna wood but what normally happens is that they and that person fall out for whatever reason and they gotta call me back and have to come back in and then I see problems um but the future proofing it is it's more people can come more devices can come um things might change people might start using different things and it just you can just add it on to the network and it doesn't crumple the network that's what I'm trying to say and um and that's important in a professional in a professional um network so you want to take that into consideration right so in closing after immediately though in closing at the end of the day professional networks are reliable but they're for three things reliability security and manageability and this is why beat every day and I beat the jump every day and I say hey guys give me a call check out alexcustomtech.com or your local MSP right because we're getting into this place where technology now is gonna become beyond not everybody's understanding but a lot of people's understanding right and you have a business you're doing multiple things to take this on this is our own its own job monitoring networks is its own job you're a lawyer you can't do this you're a doctor or or a dentist or a chiropractor you're not supposed to be doing this um you know you're an accountant this is not what your job is right so really seriously considering bringing in someone else in one person MSP whatever bring someone in to help you with this it's very important right like I said um I'm doing some changes now in um with equipment I'm doing through that cycle and I'm buying some new unified stuff and I'm like and Unify is pretty cool because unify has different different kinds of equipment and they have prosumer equipment what I talk about sometimes where people enthusiasts enthusiasts are using it I just try to just bought one of the their firewalls and it's not a it can be used as a professional firewall but it has limitations too but they have the enterprise level the small business level all of that stuff so take it into consideration if you if you have any questions just go to the website I'm still working on things in the background bear with me all right but a lot of active a lot of things are up there and and the best way to be to reach out to me is really to email me email me I'll I'll get it more likely because I'm moving things around in the office now so phones are not gonna be working so email me and I'll reach out to you right and uh yeah stay productive Welcome back I'm Abby and this is the Abby Minute today I want to tell you a little about something that makes Alex Custom Tech different.

SPEAKER_00 25:23

If you've ever walked into a store for one thing and walked out wondering how you ended up being offered five other things you never asked for you're not alone. That's how a lot of businesses operate today. Every customer interaction becomes an opportunity to sell something else. But that's not how Alex sees technology. At Alex Custom Tech, we believe customer service starts with one simple question. What problem are you trying to solve? Once we understand that problem that's where our attention stays. If you need a new computer we'll help you find the right computer. If your existing computer can be repaired instead we'll tell you that too. If your network needs attention, we'll explain why. And if you don't need to spend money today, we'll tell you that as well. Our goal isn't to maximize every transaction our goal is to solve the problem you came to us with that's because trust isn't built by selling the most products. Trust is built when customers know the advice they're receiving is in their best interest, not ours. We believe technology should be an aid, not a crutch. It should make your life easier, your business more stable and your work more productive technology shouldn't be confusing and it shouldn't be something you're pressured into buying. Sometimes the best recommendation is an upgrade. Sometimes it's a repair. Sometimes it's simply saying you're good for another year. Those aren't lost sales. They're investments in a long-term reputation. At Alex Custom Tech, we don't measure success by how much we can sell you today. We measure success by whether you'll feel confident calling us the next time you need help. Our business is built on a simple belief solve the customer's problem honestly. If we do that consistently everything else will take care of itself. That's why our motto isn't just something printed on a business card. It means integrity and trust. And here at Alex Custom Tech, those aren't just words. They're the standard we try to live by every single day. I'm Abby and that's your Abby Minute. We'll see you next time. You've been listening to Act on Tech, powered by Alex Custom Tech. We help small businesses take control of their technology with secure networks, reliable backups, and systems designed to run without interruption. No guesswork, no quick fixes, just IT that works the way it should. For business services and professional camera installations, visit AlexCustomTech.com. Stay connected, stay secure, and stay in control. This is Abby from Polyvinyl 97 FM saying thank you for listening to Act on Tech. And we'll see you next Wednesday same time same place