Understanding the future requirements of an organization ties directly into both the business strategy as well as industry technology trends. As in the Business Strategy Stage (not shown), interviews with network and technology stakeholders inside as well as outside the corporation are key to understanding its direction and how technology can drive such direction. The business strategy objectives will help to formulate future direction and the corporation’s ability to embrace it. For example, a conservative culture with moderate technology budgets will not be a likely candidate for cutting-edge technology. On the other hand, a market leader with aspirations of projecting an innovative image to the public might.
Industry trend information can be utilized to assist the corporation to understand where its competitors are heading with technology and the direction the technology itself is going. Business strategy may force certain technology upon a company solely based on a competitor’s utilization of similar technology. The Cureton Group's Consultant’s bring an outside, objective view to your organization about the technological marketplace as well as the market segment any client participates in. Technology can drive future requirements as easily as future requirements drive technology.
Finally, more tangible aspects of the corporation will feed future requirements analysis. Projected corporate growth, technical staffing levels, budget, and new applications will all directly effect the requirements placed on the technology infrastructure over the next two to five years. Interviews with key players within the organization can give direction to such a plan. Below are a few issues that will impact future network requirements:
• Introduction of new sites, users, protocols, applications
• Change in future traffic source characterization
• Contingency requirements
• Performance requirements
To add the next level of depth to a future requirement analysis, quantification of future needs is required. While much of the technology that is available to analyze traffic patterns, application performance, and contingency will be discussed later in the network modeling and analysis section, it is important to understand that gathering the background data to support such quantification is essential in the up front requirements analysis.
A baseline or “as-is” analysis is a current state examination of the network technology at the time of the study. Existing network topologies, hardware, software, operating systems, traffic, and protocols throughout the organization are documented. Such documentation includes diagrams, pictures, and models of network elements.
Many of the outputs of the previous analyses serve as inputs to the new network model. Number of users, Distribution of work functions by user, mapping of work functions to applications, and frequency of executions can all be utilized. Network components and topologies can usually be directly imported into modeling tools. Traffic analysis data as well can be directly imported. Business objectives (SLA’s, up-time), hardware vendor preferences, and preferred data routes can all be identified in the model.
The final output of these analyses comprises a comprehensive and optimal design that is architected to a corporation’s individual and specific needs. These solutions incorporate a company’s business requirements, current capabilities, future requirements and industry trends into a design that is tested and proven to be the best solution for that specific environment. The solution forms the framework of a comprehensive Network Technology Plan - a two to five year roadmap that the company can follow to achieve its goals.