As your business needs change, you need to interact with your customers, partners and supply chain in different ways.
Private and hybrid clouds are helping businesses accelerate the delivery of new services
Big data and analytics are being used to mine massive amounts of data to glean insights and make more informed decisions faster
Social has added a new dimension to customer communications
And we’re all familiar with how mobility has changed the workspace.
An architectural plan for providing these network services is essential to your success. By following your network architecture plan, you’ll avoid hodgepodge additions that can lead to unnecessary complexity and costly downtime.
Why is network architecture strategy and planning so important?
By providing network services in a methodical way, you are able to avoid entropy within your network, streamline operations, and maximize uptime. When it comes time to introduce new technologies and applications, you have a clearly defined process to follow to ensure a successful deployment.
[Optional supporting statements]
Improve device and network performance, stability, reliability, and functionality by choosing the right software versions, hardware, and configurations
Improve configuration consistency and standardization
Validate changes to your infrastructure are aligned with your business objectives
Align changes to your architecture strategy
Ready to support new requirements
Make the network more predictable
Prioritize network improvement plans
Let’s take a closer look one of the leading causes for network instability: variability.
[Define what we mean by variability for the audience.]
Poll question.
Assessing variability:
How many types of hardware are you managing?
Less than 10
Less than 50
Less than 100
More than 100
How many software versions are you running?
Less than 10
Less than 50
Less than 100
More than 100
How many configurations are you managing?
Less than 10
Less than 50
Less than 100
More than 100
[Discuss Poll Results]
The combination of device configurations, software versions, and the types of hardware can determine the operating behavior and efficiency of the entire network.
Your objective: Combat variability by standardizing hardware, software, and configurations.
With proper architecture strategy and planning, you can achieve standardization, establish a baseline for your network, and provide support for the network services required by your business. So, you’ll know the answers to questions, such as:
Is this line card compatible?
Has this software been validated for use in our network?
Do I have the proper configuration?
Let’s take a look at how an organization’s network architecture strategy establishes a foundation for achieving their business goals.
Meet Carroll’s First Bank, a fictional financial institution that’s experiencing rapid growth and evolving business needs. The bank’s IT team has new network services it is planning to roll out to help it achieve their desired goals:
• Provide a better customer service experience
• Create a more engaged and productive workforce
• Protect sensitive data
• Reduce downtime
• Validate network changes prior to implementation
• Make better decisions faster
What does the bank need to look at to support expansion?
The bank is expanding rapidly due to organic growth, as well as some recent mergers and acquisitions. With plans to continue its expansion over the next 5 years, they need to design a network that will support this expansion, integration of any acquired networks, and the addition of new services.
To accomplish this, the bank’s IT team has to look at its:
• Capability – Are network services aligned to business goals?
• Capacity – How to ensure that sufficient bandwidth is provisioned.
• Scalability – Does their strategy allow for rapid growth or integration of complex networks?
• Stability – How much does the acquired network vary against their current standards?
By considering each of these factors along with their business goals, the bank developed an architectural strategy that would allow them to standardize their central location and branch location designs. This gives them the flexibility they need in order to grow quickly and with confidence that they will be able to support new locations with their existing teams and processes.
One of its first projects is to introduce a virtual bank teller at all of their branch locations. This customer service initiative requires the delivery of high-quality video from a central location to each of its branches. Because this project involves interconnecting external endpoints, such as a tablet or a web browser, with internal video endpoints, it was necessary to validate if the bank’s network can handle the additional traffic load.
In order to do this the bank went through a process of:
Estimating the increased traffic volume by defining the expected number of concurrent calls expected.
Inspecting whether their Internet gateways, Session Boarder Controllers (SBC) and Voice GWs are equipped to handle additional traffic load.
Finally, determining if the enterprise network is equipped to handle additional traffic load due to ingress video connections through the internet from a bandwidth, latency, jitter point of view.
Through this architectural planning they were able to determine that the network would be able to support the requirements of the business and support the new functionality of the mobile advisor solution. The IT team can now add this new service without worry.
Recap of 6 Fundamentals
Your architecture strategy and plan helps you establish what’s acceptable in your network and what’s not. With a strategy in place, you can identify what can be optimized to enhance your network’s stability and performance.
