Maximize your Network Assessment
There are typically two ‘conditions’ that cause an organization to engage with ours for a network assessment: Pain or Purpose. The former essentially leaves the organization with no choice but to seek external experts to help eliminate this condition and get things back in order. The latter serves to support forward momentum in the form of ‘growth’ or ‘new technologies’, helping to answer questions like ‘how’ and ‘what’.
Our Approach
Everything we do from a professional services perspective begins with an assessment. It doesn’t matter if it’s network, security, process, business or financially focused, our consultant’s seek to eliminate assumptions along their path to solutions. This, often times, clashes with the expectations of certain client’s – especially if our being there is a direct result of a painful reality. In this case, it’s common for the project sponsors to be the same folks responsible for the recent or ongoing events, leaving them in the precarious position of seeking answers to things they claim to have already known. While it may be true that upper management has ignored the calls for improvements in risky areas, directly resulting in our being there, our job is to approach everything like a forensic crime scene – we let the evidence tell the story. Where is this all going? There’s a difference in assessing the WAN edge of a two POP network and a global, discombobulated internet edge. The days of network assessments in a briefcase are over.
Telemetry is Important
The dynamic nature of networks can create problems for static assessments – invalidating findings and solutions almost as fast as they are compiled. We do use static data in our assessments, but we do not rely on them wholly. Instead we come to the table with our own network software that provides detailed discovery into how things are configured, connected and operate in near real-time. Here’s what we do:
No offense – but your Visio is probably wrong. Our dynamic mapping allows our consultant’s to visualize your network and gather real information about relationships between devices, systems and other network components. Our platform can also extract relationships from static data such as configurations for those ‘hard to reach’ places in your network.
