I have been reading heaps of books lately about accomplished sporting heroes, and one thing that they all attest to assisting them in their goals of world-wide acclaim is core strength. This is the muscles around your mid-section which give strength and poise to the rest of your body. If your core is strong, the rest of the body follows.

I know you’re asking what this has to do with IT, right? Well, lets have a look at your business. The arms and legs are your workers and their PC’s. The brain is the server and programs that you use, and the core is your network – your modem and all the switches,  firewalls and cables that keep you connected.

To enhance the way your brain operates you add knowledge through reading or education. You server needs processing power and capacity through chipsets and hard disk space. Like a boxer on the speedball to improve speed, your PC’s can get faster simply by adding RAM and using the cache. Imagine if it was that easy with your body!?!?!? I would just download some knowledge online and go to the store to have WWE superstar John Cena’s arms fitted. A fancy thought, I know.

Putting it in simple terms:

·         Einstein’s Brain = HP ML or DL server with Windows Server 2008

·         John Cena’s  arms = HP P Series workstations or laptops running Windows 7 Professional

·         Giselle Bundchen’s stomach = Good internet connection, quality modem and switches, high quality cabling, professionally specc’d wireless network, firewall to prevent attacks, antivirus to prevent viruses, business quality support and locking down programs to prevent abuse. See, it’s a little more complicated than the others…

So how do you strengthen your business core?

If you ask any fitness guru worth his salt they will tell you that balance and poise help to strengthen your core. Standing on a medicine ball, or balancing on a beam while doing other activities like catching a medicine ball.  With your network, this is the same – kind of…

Like balancing on a medicine ball, your network can be strengthened by balancing processing power, throughput speed, load and the programs that you allow to operate on it. No point in exercising your body if you’re going to eat burgers every day – similarly there is no point in increasing your throughput power if it’s just going to be used for people to look up video clips on You Tube or illegally downloading songs on Limewire.

At Evolve IT we do a lot of work with businesses to balance out the way that their network operates. Strengthen the core through good quality gear, and balance the load through ensuring that the traffic on your network is productivity based and not just Facebook and iTunes.

And like having a fitness instructor, Evolve IT can be there to personally train your business core to be the best that it can be. Unlike a personal trainer, who you only see once a week, Evolve IT can be on call all the time to ensure that your network is working out the way that it should be.