Just how dependent on Internet connections are businesses nowadays?

If the Internet is increasingly important for delivering your main business functions to customers, and enabling your employees to carry out their work, what price the reliability of your networks?

According to research carried out by market intelligence firm International Data Corporation, who surveyed over 400 business and IT leaders in six countries worldwide, the majority of respondents concluded they need "better insight and data about the performance, availability and health of those services".

We provide our IT support Bristol-based clients with continuous network support and system monitoring to make sure those businesses that rely on the Internet don't lose productive business time dealing with connectivity problems. So this survey got us thinking: since so many services are now delivered via web based services, just how dependent on the Internet is the wider business community nowadays?

It's central to many business models

Many respondents reported that their organisations do a large proportion of their business via web-based applications. One simply concluded: "we could not operate without it!" This makes connectivity, and adequate coverage for any drops in network performance, a prerequisite for revenue generation.

Employees can't work without it

The Internet has also become central to ways of working, since it enables many of the tools and databases employees use daily. One respondent summed it up, saying "staff productivity drops considerably when Internet issues occur."

Customer loyalty depends on it

Perhaps most crucially, an 'always on' reputation can be vital to customer retention. Users are notoriously unforgiving when service providers make them wait through downtime, even if it's well explained. Connectivity is vital for web-related business, and high performance is important as customers are becoming increasingly demanding.

Conclusion? Business is becoming almost umbilically dependent on high performance Internet connectivity, making it absolutely vital to monitor and manage the health of your IT networks. If you operate in Bristol or the southwest corner of England, Chorus Note can help with that: just give the team there a call.