Understanding Proactive vs. Reactive Enterprise LAN / WAN Management

Enterprise LANs and WANs involve lots of moving parts and components. As network topologies and management strategies have evolved, both proactive and reactive strategies have become crucial in managing enterprise networks. While historical approaches primarily relied on reactive strategies, advancements in software tools, machine learning, and AI now enable a more proactive approach. Despite this shift, reactive strategies remain essential. Today, the Lightyear team will guide you through the differences between these strategies and their benefits for both LAN and WAN environments.

Proactive and Reactive: Complementary Strategies

Let’s be clear: Moving to proactive maintenance is good, but reactive strategies are still useful and relevant. In fact, they make an excellent pairing!

Think about this with an analogy — a flat tire on your vehicle. Annoying, right? How would you solve it?

Proactive steps could have involved regular checks on wear and inflation, and routine tasks like rotating, balancing, and aligning the vehicle. These don’t respond to a flat tire; they take active steps to avoid it.

Reactive strategies would include tools and preparations for minor roadside repairs, like your patch or plug kit. It would also cover having the appropriate lug wrench, jack, stands, and spare tire available for major failures that cannot be fixed. These can only react to the already damaged tire, but there’s no fixing the problem without them. Sometimes, all the proactive planning in the world can’t avoid the problem, such as if you drive over a poor section of the road and pick up a nail.

As you can see from our analogy, proactive strategies don’t replace reactive responses. They augment and improve them. Not only are you now actively trying to avoid the problem, but you also have sound ways to tackle it should it still occur.

Proactive and Reactive Strategies for Enterprise LAN and WAN

While enterprise networks are vast, sprawling beasts, the same core concept applies: Your best approach to a safe, seamless network is to have complementary proactive and reactive strategies in place. This way, you are prepared for anything.

Proactive LAN and WAN Strategies

Here are a few key areas of consideration when creating a proactive LAN and WAN strategy:

• Network Monitoring: There’s no shortage of tools and software available to ensure 24/7 monitoring of your network and its components. Monitoring will always be the first step in a smart, proactive strategy. After all, you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken. Today’s network hardware often comes with monitoring capabilities built-in (Meraki products as an example), while SD-WAN and SASE products typically also offer some form of proactive monitoring capabilities to alert you of network issues.

• Traffic Analytics: This builds on the monitoring concept. If you understand your enterprise business’ standard traffic patterns, you will know if abnormalities appear. You can then focus on them. You’ll also have a starting point to gauge the impacts of new software applications or other elements introduced to the network.

It isn’t enough to monitor, however. You should also regularly audit your network, paying attention to:

• Security audits (like penetration testing) 

• Firmware levels

• Updating and applying firmware patches

• Detecting and removing rogue hardware

• Network topology

Another preventative strategy is having failovers in place. This means backup connections and even sites or cloud portals. Regular failover testing to ensure that they will function when needed is essential. Add configuration management to your plan. This helps to ensure that the equipment used as network components is regularly backed up and adheres to company standards and security policies.

Talking about security policies, documentation should be a cornerstone of proactive LAN/WAN management, too. Ensure the network design is comprehensively documented for fault isolation and troubleshooting. Also don’t forget to update those policies now and again!

Lastly, it’s critical to invest in your people. IT and Network staff that maintain the network should be adequately trained and encouraged to refresh their skills and stay up-to-date.

Reactive LAN and WAN Strategies

With those proactive protections in place, you need to ensure you’re ready to react to problems as they arise. Here are key areas to focus on:

• Incident Response: Ensure that you have appropriate tools and procedures to quickly diagnose and troubleshoot network issues as they happen, not a few days later.

• Support Systems: There should be a mix of people, processes, and knowledge bases to ensure that LAN/WAN issues are efficiently routed to the appropriate stakeholders for troubleshooting and repair. These paths should be clear and accessible for all staff. 

• Diverse and Redundant Links/Hardware: Mission-critical links and hardware should be deployed with backups that can be utilized in the event of a failure. Again, you want these ready to go to minimize disruptions, so plan ahead.

• Change Management: Sometimes, the most difficult aspects to manage in an enterprise LAN or WAN network are the human touchpoints.  Ensuring that there are adequate change management processes with rollback plans is critical.

• Root Cause Analysis: After any network-related issue, it’s essential to ensure that the reason for the problem is correctly identified and any lessons learned are documented and shared for the future.

These two network maintenance strategies, used side-by-side, will ensure an enterprise LAN and WAN network with as few disruptions as possible. We all know the significant impact a network outage can have on business operations. With agile, regularly updated proactive and reactive strategies in your toolkit, you can keep those painful, costly outages and failures at bay.

If you’re planning your network management and maintenance strategies, why not add the Lightyear Telecom Operating System to your toolkit?  The experienced Lightyear team will help you power up your enterprise with the proper proactive and reactive strategies to thrive.