Setting up Office Wireless Network? Do Not Make these Mistakes

With the ever increasing growth of technology the mobile devices are today becoming an essential asset of the workplaces. They have almost become synonyms to the coffee vending machines in the offices. This also calls for a swift and much reliable wireless network as well. But setting up one is not as simple as it sounds. In fact for the first timers, putting together a robust Wi-Fi network that is capable enough to support your business can turn out to be a pretty daunting task.

Mentioned below are common pitfalls which you can certainly avoid while setting up your office wireless network.

Suitable Placement of Wi-Fi access points

The physical setting of your Wi-Fi access point plays a very crucial role. Perhaps the simplest way to locate the possible location of your Wi-Fi access is to visualize the wireless signals emerging from the access points in a straight line. Avoid the parts of your office that are blocked by three or more obstructions to avoid experiencing weak or non-existent office network signals.

Under Provisioning Your Wi-Fi Network 

Do not commit the mistake of relying solely on one access point for your office IT setup, regardless of the network load. The ubiquity of tablets, laptops and above all the smart phones in the workplace highlights the probability of having dozens of wireless devices connected even with 10-12 employees. Therefore installing multiple access points certainly minimizes the risk of productivity killing bottlenecks.

Overloading the Wireless Router

Though it’s perfect to start off your network with entry level wireless routers, but as the office IT setup grows variety of consumer grade routers get overloaded because of addition of high-throughput appliances such as NAS or the IP cameras. Therefore setting up of a standalone network switch and a wireless access point can offer you the solution.

Do Not Get Drifted with the Speeds shown on the Box

There is a guaranteed scope of getting overwhelmed by the 350Mbps and 400Mbps speeds promised by 802.11n wireless routers for your office network setup. But you need to remember that these are all theoretical readings which do not really stand accountable in the actual conditions.

Changing Your Router’s Default Channel 

It is very important for you to change the default channel on your device when you set it up. It’s pretty much easy as there are only three non-overlapping channels namely one, six and eleven. Certain Wi-Fi access channels offer the information about the channels they are currently using plus they also display the signal strengths of each. These routers offer significant help for altering such settings.

Ignoring the 5GHz Band

You need to ensure that your 5GHz radio is enabled in case your router is offering simultaneous dual band. This allows offloading of laptops supporting 5GHz by freezing up the 2.4GHz band for the other devices including tablets and smart phones.

Why Smart SMB Owners Opt for Offsite Backup Solutions

Businesses today cannot afford to lose their data. It’s their lifeline. So naturally they want to take all possible steps (they’re aware of) to protect this data. But, unlike paper files or classified hard documents, you cannot protect digital data by locking it up in a safe.

 

There’re other ways to do that. Offsite backup is one of the many.

Smart small and medium scale business owners nowadays opt for offsite backup solutions. Thanks to cloud solutions and other technological advancements, it’s cheap and almost everyone with a decent budget can go for even the highest quality remote backup solution.

What is Offsite Backup?

Every time an IT provider talks about an offsite backup, they refer to just one out of different kinds of backups. Basically, an offsite backup means that the business data and backups of your company will be taken out of the physical location your business is located at. That means, your backups won’t be stored on your local network or stand alone hard drives! Having said that, if there’s a natural calamity - your business critical data would be at a safe location!

Offsite backup normally involves two ways including physical transport and remote backup. Physical transport may include copying main files into a hard drive so that it can be stored somewhere else. It also includes backing up of the whole system on tape and storing it off site. That’s old school. Remote backup is the latest method in which your data is stored on offsite servers. These servers in turn, store multiple copies at different locations.

 

Why Smart SMB Owners Opt for Offsite Backup Solutions

Reliability: Since offsite or remote backup can be automated, you don’t really have to be a geek to use such a solution. This system updates your files from time to time (normally daily) and you are allowed to set update timing yourself as well. You can recover files immediately should the need arise from any location in the world.

Reduced Workload: Unlike traditional solutions, remote backup solutions don’t require IT professionals to back up data manually. You can initiate a remote backup operation with just one click or schedule daily updates. For example, a remote server may copy data from a particular folder or drive every five minutes or once in a day. This saves time and reduces manual efforts and workload.

Easy Set Up and Security: Remote backup solutions require a few clicks to be set up and can even be automated so that your data remains up-to-date and backed up. The servers are located in highly secure data centers. Most providers make use of the latest encryption tools to keep your data safe.

Cost-effective Solutions: Remote backup solutions save way more money than physical storage solutions do. In addition to that, these solutions generally come with unlimited storage space and monthly charges are quite reasonable.

Cloud Computing the Next Big Thing in Singapore

Cloud is the buzzword across Singapore businesses – it is fast revolutionizing the way both public and private sector businesses were operating. In the past only a few big giants had their own in-house servers and cloud systems, but with the passage of time, third party sharing is allowing Small Enterprises to also integrate their businesses with the cloud.

Leading the way – Public Sector Steps in First

Like most things, Singapore government is leading the way in the moving the public sector agencies to a centralized system of IT Procurement. Countries across the globe are taking inspiration from its private cloud infrastructure, most popular as the G-Cloud. It has being set as an example for sharing IT resources and applications across the public sector.

The earliest movers to the platform are the Inland Authority of Singapore (IRAS) and Ministry of Education. Many others are in line to make similar migrations very soon.

The government has also been the first to realize the challenges being posed. According to various analyses, the government as well as the private sector will have to face the challenge of educating the existing employees on how to leverage cloud for procuring, designing and delivering projects.

Private sector to leverage from infrastructure access

Local companies, SME’s are all now moving to adopt cloud models through server service providers. These models enable companies to decide about the type of virtual resources they want to subscribe. They also provide flexibility to scale their IT needs instantly without wait or hassle.

Industries in Singapore are already experiencing a rise in the trend of adapting to cloud computing. The trends are most prevalent in the Logistics, Entertainment and Media companies.

Logistics companies are the first in line because they need to compete by developing newer cloud applications. They deal in a diverse variety of goods, and so need to add new applications to their servers. The cloud enables them to scale up their capabilities quickly and more cost-effectively.

The entertainment industry is also showing an increased demand for the cloud because it experiences short bursts, especially for instant viewer votes and reviews. We see so many TV shows that need voting, from talent hunts, news surveys that record millions of views instantaneously.

TV stations may not want to have a fully fledged cloud server for incoming data may only come in once in a while, but since the latest cloud technology is now provides great flexibility, you can simply hire third party services.

And, this trend is not just restricted to the entertainment and media, but to most companies in Singapore, who are now moving from building their own private clouds to the system hiring third party services. This is also giving them a chance to test the cloud, before they could plan of having their own small scale independent cloud.

Server & Network High Availability Systems - When You Just Cannot Afford Down Time

Given the high demand, the high availability architecture is one of the most important requirements for an Enterprise development. There are extensive set of high availability features, which protect the components and applications from untimely and unplanned down time and in return minimize the planed downtime.

A network high availability system is created to function when either of its components fail to work. Designed to do this, the high availability system contains backup components which it automatically switches over to when one or more of its active components stop working. The system is designed to switch automatically primarily to make the fail over to look seamless to the users so that the service and function is not interrupted in anyway.

Features &Benefits of High Availability System

• Built-in Redundancy:

Although high availability makes use of high quality equipment by default to built highly durable systems, but they still cannot promise complete reliability. The systems are still vulnerable to outages. To ensure utmost reliability, high availability systems come with built-in redundancy. The critical parts of the IT systems will be put together with redundancy in order to provide 100 percent uptime.

• Real-Time Backups:

Today most of the backup tools work on a schedule or on demand. In order to ensure that the recovery copy is accurate within a short frame of time, there has to be a tool that allows more frequent backups. Real-time backups or continuous backups allow automatically saving a copy of every change made to a file, essentially capturing every version of the file and guarantying that the recovery copies are accurate to within a few minutes.

• Automated Fail-Over:

During the time of unplanned outage, it becomes extremely important to transfer the operations and applications to backup resources in the shortest time frame. When this failover situation occurs, traditionally human intervention is required, which is quite slow and unreliable. To deal with this critical problem, high availability system come with an advanced automated fail-over technology that enables both automated fail-over and automated fail-back when the original outage is resolved.

• Automated Off-Site Backups:

With advancement in technology a better backup solution has been developed called the automated off-site backups. Unlike the traditional method where the backup copies required to be shifted to a secondary location manually, the automated off-site backup does it without depending on IT personnel to execute that process.

• Convenient implementation:

One of the most interesting and useful features of high availability is that it is very convenient. Implementation of High availability systems do not interrupt business operations as they are assembled and tested separately, making its implementation hassle-free. Once the system is

• Cost efficient:

High availability systems are not just more reliable and convenient, but are also cost efficient. With the high availability system, one doesn’t require many servers. Just a single physical server is capable of running 2 or more virtual servers, hence cutting down on the extra cost associated with purchasing additional servers.