The Four Biggest Mistakes of High Speed Networking Implementation

The technology world is full of overtime, over budget, neglected, and abandoned projects. Many good IT leaders have borne the brunt of the blame when these project go south. Most of these problematic projects could have been avoided if steps had been taken during the planning stages to anticipate issues before they became a major catastrophe.

In our latest eBook, we discussed how to overcome one of the biggest hurdles of your proposed high speed networking project: Convincing senior leadership to fund your high speed networking project. Once you’ve laid out a clear vision and stressed the quick ROI for your project, the last thing any IT leader wants is a failed project that doesn’t live up to what was promised. Your reputation could be on the line and missteps could cost your company tens of thousands of dollars and could cost you your job.

So how do you nail down issues that will inevitably require more configuration time and spending? By taking extra time during the planning stage to make sure that you’re accounting for every possible detail. To help you along, we’ve laid out the top four mistakes to avoid during your high speed networking implementation:

MISTAKE 1 – Poor Project Planning. Build out a comprehensive business and technology plan for your high speed networking project. While it may not actually take Jedi Mind tricks to convince your CFO on the validity of your project, you may need to use the Force to Make Your Business Case and share your vision with the team. Many projects fail because the IT team hasn’t come together to create a well formulated plan that considers both the business needs and technology needs. When you’re making your business case, be sure to include upfront planning time, as spending more time here will save you from some potentially painful conversations with your leadership team if any part of your plan falls through.

MISTAKE 2 – Not Accounting for Your ACTUAL Network Usage. Knowing and accounting for your actual network usage is a critical step that is often overlooked. It might also be based on demands that don’t take the reality of your situation into consideration. Your leadership team may stress that the project should only account for your basic needs, like email and regular web browsing. This may fail to take into consideration how many users are streaming music or video or are sharing large files over the network.

MISTAKE 3 – Failing to Assess ALL Existing Network Equipment. Many times, we see projects where bandwidth increases, but the bottleneck was not the ISP. It was the internal network equipment. Make sure that you’re assessing the age and performance of your equipment. It may be time to upgrade your internal switches and your firewall. Is your internal network robust enough to handle large files and today’s large applications that are still being run on servers and virtual servers? Make sure your server technology is ready for a networking upgrade and that your beefy local server has room to breathe.

MISTAKE 4 – Email is Overlooked. In the first four points, it was hard not to include email as a consideration for each point, but email is so important and often overlooked that it needed a place of its own.

• Are you hosting your own email? Consider that if you host an Exchange type solution and you’re moving some extremely large files, the heavy impact on both bandwidth needs and could mean a deeper look into the equipment you’re hosting your email on.
• What are you considering when switching your email to another ISP? Things can get messy rather quickly once a service request for cancellation is made to your current ISP. Know where your domain information is hosted and where the email points. Get the registrar information and be proactive with getting things moved around.
• Is your email hosted in the cloud? We sometimes see clients moving towards hosted services for email, but they lack an internal network robust enough to handle their needs. Getting a deeper assessment of how much bandwidth your cloud hosted email solution takes up will help you better plan for your high speed networking needs.

These are some of the most frequent problem areas we see as clients start to implement their high speed networking implementations. Knowing these common pitfalls helps us work with customers to get the whole story. Considerations for servers, switches, applications, bandwidth, file sizes, VoIP phone systems, and more all have to be thoroughly considered to properly plan and execute a high speed networking implementation.

Addressing these concerns may take some more additional time at the outset of the project, but it will be time well spent if you address them early. If you’re thinking about your next big project, take these points to heart. If you’re looking for some additional perspective on your next project, reach out to us to find out how we might be able to help. For some local perspectives, take a look at our customer testimonial videos and learn how we helped other IT Leaders in the Greater Atlanta Area tackle their toughest IT challenges.

Share this post?