While businesses spend a considerable amount of time and money on developing their products and services to stimulate growth what often gets overlooked in the process are the measures that will need to be put in place to not only meet the demands of that growth but encourage continued success as well. If a business wants to continue to grow they need to have a dependable and efficient infrastructure in place, one that is fully capable of handling the expansion of the company without compromising the quality and integrity of the company.
In most businesses this infrastructure is the computer network system which not only allows employees to share files, data, hardware and software but also facilitates communication among employees and preserves information. Needless to say, the computer network system is critical to the success of a business and its health should be of paramount importance. Neglecting to take care of the computer network’s health is courting disaster and can quickly result in a complete crash that wipes out sales and ruins a company’s reputation.
To avoid such a catastrophe many companies have turned to larger drives to ease the burden placed on the computer network system. Unfortunately that thinking is flawed as it doesn’t address the real problem and could actually make it worse. While larger drives are certainly capable of handling more information and supporting communications this only means that when a computer network system crashes there is more lost.
The real issue at hand is understanding what threats pose the greatest risk to a computer network system, regardless of their size, and it’s hard to start that list without putting fragmentation at the top. This computer disease is fully capable of turning an efficient and profitable business into a chaotic mess as it attacks every area of the computer network, making it next to impossible to share files, data, hardware, and software while at the same time making communication and information preservation suspect.
What makes fragmentation all the more dangerous is that it is a naturally occurring computer disease that starts the minute you boot up your system. Fragmentation targets the manner in which files are saved and stored on the hard drive and because a system is constantly saving and storing these files, whether they are permanent or temporary, the computer disease is always growing.
It’s not difficult to notice when a hard drive has been affected by fragmentation because the computer network system begins to slow down considerably. Accessing information and sharing files can become a timely process, something as simple as sending a document to a printer can be an adventure, and trying to communicate with other employees on the network is purely unreliable.
All of this is caused because of the manner in which hard drives have been designed to save and store files. For a hard drive there is nothing more important than space and to maximize the amount of free space available a hard drive stores files one after the next, with no room between any two. As a saved file is recalled, modified, and then resaved it no longer fits in the space that it originally occupied and the hard drive is then forced to cut the excess information and store it in the next available space, this is now known as a fragmented file.
Because there is no limit to how many times a single file can be fragmented it’s not uncommon for hundreds if not thousands of pieces of a file to be scattered across the hard drive. For a business it can be much worse as employees often share files, make changes to those files and then resave those files, each time causing that file to be fragmented into more pieces. What this does is slow down the process of everything on the network because the hard drive is forced to work harder to meet the demands placed upon it. Something as simple as retrieving a document becomes a lengthy process as the hard drive has to find all of the fragmented pieces before it can deliver the document to the screen.
As fragmentation goes unchecked and the disease progresses the burden on the hard drive eventually becomes too great and a crash occurs. This catastrophic event can erase everything that has been saved on a network and the damage caused in such an event could be too much for a business to overcome. As drives become larger and capable of storing more information the damage caused by fragmentation also becomes greater, it simply has more files to ruin.
Fortunately a business can put fragmentation in check with a simple action, installing defragmentation software. Defrag software is the quickest and most effective tool to restoring speed and reliability to a computer network system and protecting that system from fragmentation in the future. What defrag software does is repair every file that has been fragmented, gathering the pieces that belong to a single file and then saving them as a single unit. This makes the hard drive’s job of locating and delivering that file easier and quicker, thus returning a business to efficiency and reliability.
With defragmentation software for computer network systems available from companies like Diskeeper it really takes just a simple action to protect the integrity of a business. The smart thing to do for any business is to install defragmentation software on their network system before a slowdown is noticed. Why put yourself through the headaches that will inevitably come when you can take care of it now and protect yourself from future attacks.
