What are the key considerations that you need to determine in planning of your network routing infrastructure?

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Network infrastructure is a set of software and hardware components that help build, run, and maintain an IT network.

• Network Infrastructure Definition

  Network infrastructure is the broader collection of fundamental components that work cohesively to run an IT network and is a critical part of an organization’s IT infrastructure.

  Since an organization relies on its IT network to run mission-critical applications and business operations, ensuring the underlying network infrastructure is reliable, safe, robust, and scalable is crucial.

• What does a network infrastructure consist of?

  Network infrastructure can be a mix of hardware devices, software applications, and network services, including:

  • Hardware infrastructure typically includes routers, switches, hubs, repeaters, gateways, bridges, and modems.
  • Software infrastructure includes monitoring and management tools and operating systems.
  • Network services include networking protocols such as TCP, UDP, and IP addressing.

  An organization can extend its IT network by integrating with third-party services from managed service providers (MSPs) or build hybrid network infrastructure by integrating on-premises infrastructure with cloud services.

• What is network infrastructure design?

  Network infrastructure design can help you plan how to implement, monitor, and manage an IT network. A design can be created after identifying the operational requirements in terms of capacity, bandwidth, quality of service, security, and resilience.

  Network infrastructure design can help you plan an IT network more efficiently. After implementation, network design can aid you when troubleshooting network issues by helping you more easily understand the roles of various components in the network and how a malfunctioning device may affect the network and other systems using the network.

  In addition to planning the network infrastructure design, network administrators can also use network topology software to gain visibility into network infrastructure, configuration, and performance. In addition, network configuration software can help update topology maps by scanning for changes in the network to help you better understand network infrastructure mapping, identify network architecture changes, and scale capacity more efficiently.

• What is network infrastructure management?

  Network administrators implement network infrastructure management practices to ensure the network operates optimally by identifying performance bottlenecks, remediating problems, and determining the need for scaling to support growing business operations.

  Overall, network infrastructure management focuses on five aspects of networking:

  1. Network Infrastructure Monitoring: A network infrastructure monitoring system continuously monitors the network and reports problems. For example, a router may be receiving more traffic than it can handle and crashes, impacting network availability.
  2. Configuration Management: This aspect focuses on ensuring network devices are configured with best practices, patched, upgraded, or replaced when needed. Usually, network administrators leverage automation tools to track and manage configuration changes more effectively when managing more extensive IT networks.
  3. Performance Management: This aspect focuses on analyzing a network and maintaining a required network performance level to ensure business operations aren’t negatively impacted. Some of the critical metrics relevant to performance management include available network capacity, bandwidth utilization, latency, and throughput, among others.
  4. Fault Management: This aspect helps identify problems in an IT network and determine root causes to fix issues from recurring. Some tools even apply automated remediation through pre-defined playbooks when a problem occurs, improving efficiency and meaning time to recovery (MTTR).
  5. Security Management: Since an IT network is critical to business operations, it is imperative to ensure it’s protected from various network-based threats and block malicious attempts to gain unauthorized access. Network administrators can use firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and log traffic monitoring tools to help ensure the network is safe and attacks are identified and blocked quickly.

• What is software-defined networking (SDN)?

  SDN is an architectural approach to manage IT networks and underlying infrastructure. SDN can help you more easily centralize management and control, abstract infrastructure management, and improve flexibility by promoting automation and policy-enforcement practices to make network management more effective and agile.

• What are network infrastructure solutions?

  Network infrastructure solutions are designed to solve specific problems in networking. For example, a firewall solution may be available for different environments, such as on-premises, virtual machines, and cloud-based firewalls to address the security needs of the specific IT network.

  Other infrastructure monitoring solutions can monitor the health of the network devices and systems connected to the network. Such solutions send notifications when performance issues are detected in the network to help you more easily remediate problems early on and limit disruptions.

• How do network infrastructure management solutions work?

  As corporate IT networks become increasingly complex, manual network infrastructure management methods are often ineffective. To streamline monitoring and troubleshooting, networking administrators may choose to implement network management solutions to more easily control network infrastructure.

  Network infrastructure management solutions are designed to use standard networking protocols, such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP), to help maintain, monitor, and discover network elements, provision network-based services, and deploy new hardware and software components. Some solutions may also include custom protocols that work exclusively to simplify management and gather more granular details about the network components of specific vendors.

  Some network infrastructure management solutions also use agent-based management installed on network servers and devices that report back on important metrics and statuses to provide more in-depth metrics than agentless monitoring. However, some devices in the network may not support agent-based monitoring. Other network infrastructure solutions are built to offer both agent-based and agentless monitoring to leverage the advantages of both approaches.

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