This article was previously published on December 16, 2020 and updated for comprehensiveness and accuracy. 

Key Points:

• A strong network infrastructure is essential for business productivity, security, and uptime, yet outages and performance issues are rising across industries.
• It’s important for businesses to ask critical questions to help reveal gaps in visibility, security strength, load balancing, recovery capabilities, and automation within their network.
• Recent studies show downtime can cost businesses hundreds of thousands, even millions, per hour, highlighting the need for resilient infrastructure.
• Modern solutions are available that offer scalability and enhanced protection for businesses seeking stronger network performance. 

A high-performing network is the backbone of any modern business. Internet connectivity, software and hardware functionality, and network security are key to keeping your employees productive and your business successful. 

Your network infrastructure comprises everything from computing data to communicating between your company’s devices, applications, servers, and more. It is the foundational pillar of your IT ecosystem, responsible for transmitting information and ensuring systems are online and responsive. 

It’s easy to see why network infrastructure is vital: but is yours performing optimally? Below are five critical questions to ask to know whether your network reliably supports the needs of your business.  

1. Is there a centralized way to monitor network activity? 

Ask: Do you have a central dashboard or portal that lets you monitor security events, unusual or suspicious activity, and incidents in real time? 

Having a unified platform for network activity, including logs, alerts, and incident history, helps you spot early warning signs (e.g. rising error rates, anomalous traffic patterns, or hardware faults) before they become major problems. 

Why that matters: outages and downtime are growing more common. According to a 2025 survey, 84% of businesses reported increasing network outages over the past two years. More so, these disruptions aren't cheap, for over a third of surveyed organizations, outages cost between $1 million and $5 million in the past year alone. 

In an environment like this, lacking visibility into your network is like operating blindfolded. Without monitoring, you don’t know whether minor glitches or slowdowns are one-off events or symptoms of a serious underlying problem. 

2. Can you verify how strong your network security is? 

Security isn’t optional. It’s mission critical. To better evaluate your network security, ask yourself: 

• Can you manage user access effectively (e.g., limit who can access what)?
• Do you have robust user authentication?
• Are networks isolated appropriately (especially for sensitive data)?
• Are your operating systems, virtual machines, applications, and network traffic protected? 

If you can’t answer “yes” confidently to these questions, you may be leaving your organization vulnerable. Network security is a major factor in downtime and data loss. According to a 2024 survey of 1,700 technology professionals, network failures were among the top causes of high-impact outages. 

Given rising regulatory and compliance pressures (e.g., data privacy laws, industry-specific regulations), security must be built into the very foundation of your network infrastructure. 

3. Is your network effectively balanced and optimized for workload demand? 

As businesses grow, the demands on network infrastructure increase. More devices and more cloud services mean more remote users and more data. If your system isn’t designed to distribute workloads efficiently across computers, servers, and network segments, you can run into performance bottlenecks, latency issues, or even crashes that disrupt productivity. 

Inefficient load balancing or poor resource allocation can lead to lagging or application crashes and other productivity issues. 

Given the rising complexity of networks, especially for organizations processing large volumes of data or serving many users simultaneously, effective network operations management and bandwidth capacity planning are critical. 

Furthermore, as more companies embrace distributed or hybrid work environments, balancing workloads, and routing traffic intelligently, becomes increasingly challenging but also increasingly necessary. Failure to do so can degrade user experience and slow down business operations. 

4. What kind of recovery and redundancy options exist in your network? 

Hardware failures, software crashes, or human error can cause outages or data loss. Ask: 

• Do you have backup replication in place (e.g. mirrored servers, offsite copies)?
• Are there disaster recovery (DR) or business-continuity plans ready to go?
• Can you recover from hardware failure or data corruption without losing critical information or suffering extended downtime? 

Why this matters: network outages and downtime carry steep financial and reputational costs. A recent survey found that the median annual downtime from high-impact outages is 77 hours, and in some cases, outages can cost businesses up to $1.9 million per hour.  

Another source reports that for over 90% of mid-size to large companies, costs of hourly downtime exceed $300,000. 

Without robust recovery mechanisms, a single failure event can become a major crisis, harming productivity, revenues, and even brand trust. 

5. How much automation does your network use? 

Don’t assume that because you’ve automated some processes, your network is “future ready.” Ask: 

• How many of the repetitive, replicable tasks are automated (e.g., configuration management, load balancing, backups, failover)?
• Are you using tools (or planning to use tools) that allow automated monitoring, alerting, and incident response?
• Is minimal manual intervention required for routine network tasks? 

The rationale is clear: when your network setup still relies heavily on manual work, especially for configuration, deployment, or recovery, you’re missing opportunities. Automation reduces human error, accelerates response times, and frees your IT staff to focus on higher-value work, rather than firefighting. 

Given how common network failures and outages have become (see above), automating as many processes as feasible isn’t just nice-to-have. It’s essential for resilience. 

Bonus: Is it Time to Offload Your Network Infrastructure? 

If your current business is struggling or lacking in any of the areas above, it may be time to consider outsourcing a qualified vendor that can handle your network security needs for you.  

When you partner with someone like Vector Security Networks, we provide an effective, scalable, and cost-efficient alternative to building and managing your own network. Some of the advantages include: 

• Cost savings and predictable expenses: Avoid upfront capital expenditure on servers and networking hardware; only for what you use. 
• Scalability and flexibility: When demand increases, we can scale your storage and network resources up (or down) quickly. 
• Reduced infrastructure maintenance: No need to manage network hardware and software upgrades internally.
• Improved security and compliance posture: We offer robust physical and network security, encryption, identity and access management, and compliance support, easing part of the security burden from your internal IT team. 

Ready to build a stronger, smarter network? Contact Vector Security Networks today and let our experts help you transform your network infrastructure into a competitive advantage.