The following covers the best practices for network design that your company can implement during the process. Work with an experienced managed services provider for the best results.

1) Early Security Integration

By prioritizing security from the start of the project, there will be less vulnerabilities. In addition, overall network performance will be better as security solutions were not added on after planning, potentially causing incompatibilities. Involving security-focused team members during the entire process is the key.

2) Appropriately Using Top-Down or Bottom-Up

Building a completely new network will benefit from top-down design. Designing top-down allows your team to design with business requirements in mind from the start, maximizing the probability that the network will be effective.

Bottom-up design is applicable and more efficient when there is already an existing network and established business requirements. Typical examples are a network needing to increase bandwidth or expand to accommodate growth.

3) Standardization

Standardization will ease asset management, maintenance, patching, and troubleshooting over the long term. The following are examples of elements that should be standardized.

• Cable Colors (for example: one color for data, another for VoIP, etc.)
• Hardware Models
• Hostnames (for example: printer1.office2.lan3)
• IP Address Schemes
• Security Policies

4) Plan for Expansion

Bandwidth consumption by your organization will likely grow rapidly as time passes. Anticipating the growth over your network’s service life will greatly assist the future proofing of your network design.

An easy approach is building in additional bandwidth to meet expected demand. It is also important to ensure that your network design is adequately modular and flexible for accommodating expansion.

5) Network Documentation

When network documentation is incomplete, missing, or outdated, it can result in wasting time and effort, leading to greater maintenance, repair, and upgrade costs.

Your network administrator and other IT team members will certainly benefit in the future if the network design’s deliverables include the creation of layer 1-3 network maps.

Alpha Business Support

Choosing an expert computer technology-support provider is an important decision for your business. Alpha has been a trusted partner of many companies in the Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Annapolis areas since 1990 and offer:

• 24/7 Managed Services for Business Computing Systems

• Network and Mobile Computing Support

• Disaster Recovery Planning

• Software Development

For affordable client-focused network consulting services and solutions, please call Alpha today at (410) 295-9500.