When it comes to your business, you know it’s powered through the network it’s on. Without it, you and your business employees would constantly have to deal with fighting security breaches and IT downtime. You already put a lot of investment into your business networks. When you use consumer-grade routers on important business networks, it impacts your business negatively, creates a headache to deal with, and ultimately, undermines all the important work you’ve already put into the health and strength of the network. Consumer grade routers are not inherently harmful or bad but they should not be taken outside of their intended use. They are not meant for business networks and can bring a host of potential issues and problems with them if they are used in such an environment.
Potential Security Issues
Consumer grade routers are for the average home user. They are not completely unprotected, but the cybersecurity present on these routers are not strong enough to protect the sensitive and important information that your business network needs. Security is an important part of any business and consumer grade routers certainly don’t provide the adequate amount of protection that a business needs.
Just last year, VPNFilter brought havoc on many home routers. This malware effectively stole data by intercepting information from the router. This is an invasive breach of privacy that can be extremely costly for any business, especially when sensitive data is taken into the wrong hands. Not only does this mean IT downtime, it means spending money to replace damaged equipment, investing into a new router, and having to account for any lost or stolen data.
Reliability
Consumer grade routers are meant and built for casual use. Gaming, internet, streaming, and conducting an average amount of work at home are all great for consumer grade routers. Businesses, however, require a router that can handle both security and lots of connections at once. Your business will have multiple people connected all conducting high demand work in order to do their jobs. A consumer grade router is not able to handle those many connections and run that many actions concurrently. This will lead to a slow internet connection which is a source of frustration for both you and employees.
Support and Features
Since consumer grade routers are not built for business use and thus inherently do not have many of the features that are commonly associated with business class routers. Amenities such as VPN, VLAN, and much more can be utilized and improve quality of life for everyone connected. Businesses also need business-minded solutions, consumer grade routers do not have the support capabilities needed to troubleshoot or make any needed maintenance checkups or repairs for your business.
Benefits of Using Proper Routers
Your business network should have the best router for the job. Business optimized routers improve filtering, has superior hardware to handle the workloads of day to day operations, and constantly providing updates and support should there be any issues. On the security side of things, enterprise routers will be able to isolate any potential malware infections so they don’t cause trouble to all systems and section off any potentially infected device to halt the spread of malware. Consumer routers do not offer any of these benefits and if they do, they are not good enough to handle major threats that businesses are faced with every day.
A good router meant for a business network should be considered an investment and not an expense. Consumer grade routers should be left to where they excel best, at the home. Using them at work means more stress for IT professionals and for the business as a whole. Utilizing the proper router for the job allows you to properly strengthen your network and ensure that strength will hold up over the time of the network. Using a consumer-grade router to cut corners on costs will only have your business end up giving up more of its manpower and expenses in the long run. Having a proactive approach towards which router to invest in for your business network will positively affect your business as a whole.