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It is therefore imperative for your business to review its network design from time to time to ensure that it is not only meeting current business requirements but also satisfying security, speed and user demands, as these will all change over time.

When architecting a network design, whether for one site or five hundred, it's important to weigh the needs and wants of those who will be using it against the budget and security requirements of those who will be paying for it. Some important things you should consider before undertaking a network design - whether it be a greenfield project, adding on additional sites or upgrading your infrastructure include:

Balancing Trade Offs:

Balancing security issues and an organisation's aptitude for risk against the desire for easy, quick and open access to information and applications is an important consideration when it comes to network design.

The most effective designs are carefully tailored to the needs of your organisation, taking into account your primary business function, considering the range of technologies available and the existing infrastructure, and balancing these items against security and usability demands.

Looking into the crystal ball:

Another key consideration in network design is flexibility and growth. While I'm not saying you should hunt down a good fortune-teller to see into the future and tell you how successful your organisation is going to be in five years' time, some allowance for future growth must be taken into consideration and built into your network design. Your network design should factor in future growth requirements, including everything from switch ports to DR.

Fail to plan, plan to fail:

Now more than ever, today's businesses require reliable network connectivity and access to important corporate resources and applications over robust networks. So it is imperative that your network design is constructed with a resilient disaster recovery plan in mind. Network redundancy, which eliminates single points of failure, and disaster recovery, which provides you with a secondary method for accessing business-critical resources, are two very important concepts to master when it comes to network design.

Streamline network design:

Over time, many networks become overly complex, with a variety of vendors and multiple overlapping networks or outdated technology causing inefficiencies, or worse still, network vulnerabilities. It's the network design that is ultimately failing.

A quality network design has the ability to increase business productivity and efficiency, as well as being able to adapt to growth or expansion. No matter how your organisation plans to expand, you must create a network design while keeping agility and flexibility to grow in mind.

Network designed with security in mind:

Your network design is the backbone of your network security. The more streamlined and efficient your data flow, the less risk of, or exposure to, network threats, both internal and external. Streamlining data flow, eliminating bottlenecks and risk management are all central components of a robust network design.

We make network design, simple:

No matter how complex the ecosystem, ICT's network designs can remove unnecessary duplications, increasing network speed and functionality, and decreasing operational risk. Large-scale operations are our speciality, and we've been able to manage significant projects from network design to implementation with ease.

Our expert network engineers work closely with yours to ensure our knowledge of the project, the existing network design, and the organisational priorities are clear from the planning and development stages. We can assess the existing technology to see what can be incorporated into the updated network design, as well as working efficiently to deadlines, so your network design can be implemented according to your milestones and timetable.

Our network engineers are experienced with complex IT environments, including the character and interplay between all major enterprise vendors. These specialist insights will give you confidence that your network design will take into account the most minute detail, reflecting the particular needs of your organisation and your customer base.

To ensure your network operates at full capacity, and is efficient, streamlined and able to protect your most important assets, ICT Networks' consultants are the leading choice for complex network designs.