Whether it is a new office or a plant network upgrade, decisions made at design time affect performance, security and operating cost for years. Here are the groups of questions to answer early.
1. Requirements and scale
- Current and expected users and devices over 3 to 5 years.
- Critical applications and their bandwidth and latency needs.
- Special devices: production machines, cameras, IoT, medical equipment.
2. Cabling and floor plan
- Cable routes, racks, equipment room and backup power.
- A Wi-Fi site survey to set access-point positions and count.
- Spare ports and pathways for growth.
3. Segmentation and security
- Separate user, server, guest and production or IoT networks into distinct zones.
- Firewall and policy between zones.
- Device access control and user authentication.
4. Redundancy and uplinks
- Two Internet links from two providers for critical systems.
- Redundant core devices and UPS power.
- A plan for when a link or device fails.
5. Operations and documentation
- Monitoring and alerting for network devices.
- Configuration backup and controlled change process.
- Handover of network diagrams, IP address tables and configuration documents.