Understanding the Current Network
To understand the existing Terra Flora network, the newly hired CIO must go through the following steps.
- Identifying all hardware on the network, including clients, workstations, and servers. This information should be sufficiently detailed to help determine what equipment must be upgraded.
- Identifying the geographic extent of both the local area networks (LANs) and the wide area networks (WANs), including the media used for the LAN and to create the WAN.
- Identifying the location of the network components and operating systems.
- Identifying bandwidth information.
- Identifying specific user activities, the numbers of users doing those activities, and the usage patterns on the network.
- Identifying specific tasks, such as storing files, server backups, posting data to a database, data replication, and application distribution.