Tuesday 17 January 2012

Causes of slow intranet and impact on business

Reasons for slow intranet 

  • Users could be wasting the bandwidth through running heavy downloads or opening a variety of tasking websites like social media platforms. This reduces the amount of bandwidth available thus slowing down the system. This is because such websites and downloads use a lot of bandwidth when running.
  • The other reason could be that the number of users has increased and thus running of tasking websites has also probably increased. This would result to slowing down the entire system of the intranet and thus connectivity would be hindered.
  • A router could also be used in the intranet connection and if that is the case users accessing the intranet remotely would encounter slow speeds if the router is unable to encrypt VPN (Virtual Private Network) fast enough.
  • Network interface card, computers with bad network adapters can slow down the entire network. Faulty NICs are known to broadcast junk (useless) packets of data. This increases traffic on the network and eventually slowing down all users.
Solutions
Below are solutions to the above issues in respective order.

  • There are several softwares that can monitor the protocols that are putting pressure on the bandwidth. These softwares also have the ability to kill some of the protocols and stop certain websites from loading and other operations such as downloads.
  • Another solution would be to increase the amount of bandwidth in direct promotion to the amount of use in the organization. This will ensure everyone is allocated enough to continue with fast speeds on the network.
  • The router can be replaced by use of a pfSense box (open source firewall/ router) as replacement or used with the router to improve its VPN encryption speed in order to keep up with connectivity. This would be best for people accessing the intranet remotely. This is because data being sent via VPN needs to be encrypted and if this is not done fast enough then the resultant effect would be slow response for the user.
  • Network interface cards that are faulty should be replaced to ensure the speeds on the network improve.