For owners of small manufacturing businesses, the choice of deciding which IT provider to go with can be daunting. Even knowing your business inside and out, trusting the security and flow of operations to an external company is a decision that shouldn't be taken lightly.
Most business owners simply don't have the years of experience required to know how manufacturing IT needs to be structured, and frankly, more than a few IT companies don't know what makes manufacturers different from other businesses.
The best way The Network Doctor has served our manufacturing partners has been through building a "Shop Floor" network, bisecting any existing network connections and running the two networks simultaneously. By separating manufacturers into a "Shop Floor" and a traditional business network, we've set manufacturers up for continued success to operate protected from disaster.
One of the reasons this is necessary is that manufacturers that have been around for decades often have critical legacy tech that is vital to operations but cannot be upgraded/replaced (either due to budgetary concerns or there not being a suitable alternative). Because of the age of these pieces of a network, the whole network can be open to serious breaches through vulnerabilities. Separating these processes from the business network (where the valuable information that cybercriminals actually want is) disincentivizes you as a target and keeps any unwanted visitors from accessing your data.
MSPs that don't have the decades of experience working with manufacturers will often look at this problem differently. When outdated software shows up, the first step is to tear the whole network down and rebuild it. While an understandable first impulse, this is expensive, impractical, and can result in the kind of downtime that gives IT support a bad name.
The ideal plan for a manufacturer would be to separate the legacy network from the business network and service these two infrastructures totally differently, and that sort of thinking can only come from an MSP that understands manufacturing businesses exceptionally well.
To get started with this sort of MSP, schedule a 15-minute discovery call with The Network Doctor today to see how a 'Shop Floor' network may be the solution your manufacturing business needs.
