To design a network, you must understand its technical goals. Very often it is not possible to meet all goals at the same time because of conflicting features and requirements. Therefore, it is important to understand the nature of each goal and make necessary tradeoffs to address customer requirements. A network designer tries to achieve as many technical goals as possible. Within an organization’s overall network technical goals, there are elements that may have a higher business priority than others. 

Review the goals outlined in your reading for this week (scalability, availability, network performance, security, manageability, usability, adaptability, and affordability).

Identify a business case of your choosing that requires the support of a network. This could be a scenario you’ve experienced in your professional life or one that you’ve read about in your resources or other research.

Post the following to the Discussion Board:

Briefly describe the network support requirements for your business case.

Which two of the eight goals listed above are the most important in your scenario? Why?

Which is the least important? Why?

What are the most likely constraints in achieving your most important goals? What tradeoffs should you be prepared to make in order to achieve those goals?

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Developing system support for the customer requires us to understand the needs of the customer. We must also understand their goal for the proposed solution. Understanding these will help us to develop support that is effective and efficient.

The sample business scenario is developing an SAP system support for a manufacturing company.

SAP is a comprehensive application that provides solution for all businesses. The goals discussed in this section are very important in choosing a solution. SAP offers three modules, SAP Business One, ByDesign and SAP ERP.

For the company, we assessed the company’s plan, we observed that Affordability and Adaptability are the two most important goals of the company. The company prioritised the ability to use the SAP system with new technologies, to embed more solutions. Also, it is a startup business, they are concerned about the cost of the solution. The least important of the goals discussed in this section is Availability. This is because, they plan to use the system only during the working hour.

The most likely constraint in achieving the goal of affordability is the number of users allowed on the network. The company have more users than the SAP Business One system allows. The trade-off we will work on is Security to have some staff having similar roles merged on the system.

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BTC is a small non-profit organization that focuses on fostering positive social change. They have a small office with five on-site employees and five remote employees. All BTC business systems (E-mail, file storage, collaboration software, and enterprise resources planning (ERP)) are cloud-based. The office has no wired connectivity and relies on 2 wireless access points in the office that are connected to a 24-port network switch that supplies POE to the access points. The access points broadcast two SSIDs, one for the on-site staff (this SSID is hidden and uses MAC address filtering) and one for guests or contractors that may be on-site. The network switch connects to a firewall and the firewall connects to a cable modem. The office also has two multifunction wireless printers that are shared by on-site staff. The access points, network switch, firewall, and cable modem are all supported by a third-party managed service provider (MSP). All staff is provided with cellular phones that also have hot spot functionality.

Most Important Network Goals

All of BTC’s business operations happen in a cloud environment so access to the internet while on-site is extremely important. This means that network performance should be an important goal to consider. With only two access points in the office, throughput, latency, and bandwidth are all variables that need to be monitored and evaluated. Manageability is also an important network goal for BTC. This means that the network should be designed in a way that is easy for on-site staff to troubleshoot issues. The simple network design that is described above should limit service calls to the BTC’s MSP. The network should be documented in a way that allows BTC to follow a simple set of tasks to resolve technology-related requests internally. Usability should also be considered an important network goal for BTC. Oppenheimer (2010) “Usability refers to the ease of use with which network users can access the network and services” (chapter 2). The BTC network is simple enough that it should be easy to access and “just work” for on-site BTC staff.