Few of today’s businesses could tolerate being disconnected from the internet, even for a few minutes. As communication becomes increasingly digital and Cloud computing becomes the norm, losing access to the web is a productivity killer. Even if you don’t sell online, disconnection prevents a host of important tasks from being carried out, reducing efficiency and hitting profits. Even when your broadband connection is working fine, your firm’s productivity could still be in danger – from data traffic jams. If you try to squeeze too much activity down the line at the same time, everything slows down. Time is lost; productivity falls; costs go up. The costs associated with slow internet connectivity are not easy to spot. That’s because the impact is distributed across all of your web users. If every download or upload of data takes a minute or two longer than it could, or VOIP calls are disrupted by quality issues, those minutes can add up to a substantial amount of lost time, but there’s no easy way to measure this cost. Because maintaining a fast, effective web connection is so important to our customers, we have introduced an internet monitoring service and we’re offering our customers a two-week free trial.

Don’t allow unnecessary data to clog up your broadband

Internet usage monitoring lets you see exactly what data is flowing up and down your broadband pipe, making it easier to see whether specific activities are hogging more space than they should. It also allows you to track this data back to its source, so you can decide whether it’s necessary to your business. Identifying the origin of unnecessary web traffic can, in turn, reveal other threats to business productivity and even security. These can include:

• Computers infected with viruses or other malware
• Redundant applications continuing to share information over the web
• Inefficient or duplicated processes
• Inappropriate web use by employees

Internet usage monitoring can reveal hidden costs in your business

With the growing reliance on Cloud computing products, such as Microsoft 365, which are used for day-to-day tasks across your firm, maintaining a high quality internet connection becomes a business critical issue. It’s not just Cloud apps that could place increasing pressure on your broadband capacity. The growing use of video, whether being watched for information or used as a two-way communication tool, also adds to the volume of data being transferred. This means that any degradation in your quality of connection could hit productivity in many different ways, including:

• Disruption to voice and video communications, creating frustration and potentially damaging your reputation with customers
• Slowing down transaction processing, reducing capacity to handle more business without boosting your resources
• Wasting valuable staff time, as they wait for specific tasks to complete or are forced to repeat actions that fail due to poor capacity

All of these, and more, are the potential hidden costs that can hit your bottom line. In order to remain in control of their productivity, successful firms are already benchmarking and monitoring the quality of their broadband connection.

How our internet usage monitoring service can help you

If you are concerned that your broadband connectivity may not be as efficient as it could be, for whatever reason, our service can help you measure its true capacity and discover what traffic is using it today. The service can help you to optimise capacity, for example, by scheduling intensive data exchanges outside times of peak activity, as well as helping to identify the causes of potential or actual data blockages. Internet usage monitoring lets you see:

• Which device is using the internet and when
• What sites are being accessed
• What activities are being performed on those sites

The potential issues this could reveal include:

• Staff using data-intensive services, such as streaming video
• Devices sending and receiving data automatically, but unnecessarily
• Users carrying out actions with a high degree of risk, such as visiting sites containing malware

Ask for your free trial today

It’s very easy for our customers to access their free trial of our internet usage monitoring service. Simply ask for the service to be activated and after two weeks you’ll receive a detailed report of your firm’s internet usage. We can then advise on how to address any potential problems the report highlights and you can choose whether or not to continue using the service. To take advantage of this free trial, contact us today.