Information system budgets can run into millions of dollars. As large organizations increasingly rely on electronic data for managing business activities, the associated costs of computing resources continue to rise. With this in mind, your basic network plan should include the following:
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Environmental consideration—Include the location of hosts, servers, terminals, and other end nodes; the projected traffic for the environment; and the projected costs for delivering different service levels.
•Performance constraints—Consider network reliability, traffic throughput, and host and client computer speeds. For example, network interface cards and hard drive access speeds.
•Internetworking variables—Include the network topology, line capacities, packet flow assignments, redundancy and fault tolerance factors, backward compatibility (co-existence and interoperability), and security.