Network Planning

Let face it, no one gets into business to fail. You do it with the intention to grow big and guarantee a decent retirement along the way. So when it comes time to start building your business network take a few minutes to plan for the future. How do you do that you ask? Well think about the following:-

Is my business office based? Hybrid? Remote?
Will you have staff in offices?
On premises or in the cloud?

With staff working remotely and working in the cloud, your network is going to be fairly minimal. Once you have anything on premises then you need to plan.

“But wait, I don’t have any servers and my staff use laptops and mobile phones…”
Your staff need access to Wi-Fi and your premises has CCTV. A small wall mounted rack with a patch panel, broadband router, switch/hub and DVR should be all you need.

“My staff work from home but we have an applications on site”. You need a small room and/or lockable cabinet for servers, broadband router, switch and maybe backup solution and UPS.

If you are lucky enough to grow to the point where you need to have a lot of people working in offices then your network will be substantial.

Plan to have at least two network points for each person. Cabling should be delivered from above the rack. Floor delivered or underfloor cabling is messy and harder to troubleshoot in emergencies.

Network switches should be evenly distributed between network panels and include cable management. Cable Ladders are a worth it.

As you grow your needs may change so put processes in early. Use a colour key with any cabling.
Plan your cabling carefully to avoid sprawl or mess.
Network switches should be evenly distributed between network panels and include cable management. Cable Ladders are a worth it.