Technology Assessments

A well-planned LAN infrastructure, optimized for best performance, is likely to offer financial benefits as well as productivity gains. Historically it has often been difficult for organizations to maintain or improve the performance of their network whilst being stressed by commercial forces that can constrain best practice. Despite the technical abilities of network staff, time, budget and manpower have not always been readily available to ensure that the best technical solutions have always been chosen to meet the companies need or ongoing support or that the network redesign has kept up with new demand.

This situation is not untypical in many LAN infrastructures where over time the network has grown piecemeal in response to the day-to-day demands of the users and the services that have to be delivered.

PCMS recognizes this issue and offers a Network Assessment that looks at both the physical infrastructure and the business requirement in terms of the services that need to be delivered and the reliability of delivery. For businesses that are totally reliant on the network to provide deliverables such as customer facing services, manufacturing enabling services and communications, each minute of down time can be measured in cold, hard cash lost. PCMS estimates that a re-designed network can save money with respect to administration costs, down time and service outages that may amount to as much as 10-15% of the original running costs plus whatever may be saved by the significantly improved down time.

Our Network Assessment catalogs the network devices which make up the physical network and LAN / WAN connectivity. It also looks at the revision levels and how they are managed. The most critical part of the audit, however, is to understand what the network is required to do. The audit looks at the applications supported by the network and their bandwidth requirements. It considers any down time history and apparent causes. The audit also takes a long-term view of anticipated requirements to get an understanding of future capacity parameters and scope of usage.

The audit deliverables are explained in a customer report that recommends what needs to be changed, the reasons why and the business benefits that follow. Recommendations would include any changes to connectivity and management; equipment/software changes; resilience and redundancy options; and support options.

Clients benefit from:

	»	An audit tailored to your business
	»	Network measurements from which future requirements can be measured
	»	Identification of any traffic bottlenecks that affect performance
	»	Actual bandwidth usage and the capacity of the network to cope with its expected workload
	»	Identification of areas of risk with respect to single points of failure
	»	Identification of scalability limitations
	»	Identifying support issues with respect to configuration management, maintenance and ease of housekeeping
	»	Recommendations for improvements and the associated cost savings