"Sometimes the hardest part isn`t letting go but rather learning to start over."
With the never-ending influx of network-related products to the marketplace, it´s becoming almost impossible to stay current with all the offerings, much less figure out how they all work together, especially when multiple vendors are involved.
That´s where Cruxen Network Design Services can help. Our independent technicians are available to help you with your toughest projects, from virtual private networking to intrusion prevention and much more. Don´t take a chance on incorporating your new networking gear at the wrong place or time. Let Cruxen take the burden from your staff and provide accurate, effective network design assistance, without having to rely on the know-how of a pre-selected vendor.
The network design may include active components from several fields, by specifying the minimum requirements for each one of it. At this point, some pilots may be setup with generic gear just to prove the concept and at the same time to validate the new design.
Pilot – Although optional, this pilot may be key to represent the network status by including:
- Representative servers / applications and its redundant mechanisms if any
- Representative users and its authentication mechanisms, printers, phones, etc.. where such is required
"When truth is buried, it grows. It chokes. It gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it."
Depending on the gear, some policies may be applied based on users profiles.
These policies may be as simple as assigning them to a certain VLAN or more sophisticated such as denying administration protocols (such as ssh, telnet, SNMP, server activities), leaving to administrators that kind of access.
In order to grant certain priorities to key applications or users, some other policies may be enforced to applications such as IP phones (i.e.: priorities to keep latency low). Security may be enforced to certain users or devices (i.e.: allowing only certain types of traffic) by combining policies with security mechanisms such as authentication.
However, the very first step is putting in place a policy. That means to classify the different users, resources and applications / work on an acceptable policy for the network so that can be translated into configurations to be deployed. This is the missing bit in most networks and certainly something where Cruxen may help you.