Cierra Business Solutions offers highly skilled Network Specialists to help your company set-up or expand its network. For many small to medium sized companies this can be an overwhelming task. Our experts can help you develop a state of the art, integrated network that will sustain your company as it grows. Cierra Business Solutions can work with your IT staff as little or as much as necessary in order to ensure a smooth transition once your new network is installed. Our approach involves four parts:

Strategic Network Planning
Network Requirement Analysis
Network Architecture and Design
Network Implementation

Strategic Planning

With all the activity surrounding the Internet and company intranets and extranets, many businesses are finding themselves in a "catch-up" mode trying to move their internal infrastructures to one that can support these new services. How do you know that the changes you make today will continue to meet the company's business needs two or more years in the future? A Strategic Network Plan will allow you to match business goals with evolving technologies. This will enable you to select the right network design and technologies today that will support the network bandwidth and services that you need to successfully meet your company's business objectives.

Beginning with a series of interviews and analyses sessions with key Corporate IT management, and executives, Cierra Business Solutions first outlines the targeted business goals for the company. Next, we apply these goals at a high level to define information flows within the company between departments, users and external entities. Once the information flows are understood, these can be related to current and evolving network technologies and topologies to establish the preferred infrastructure directions for the company. Presented with comprehensive documentation and discussion, the Strategic Network Design is left with the company as a framework for the future network expansion.

Requirements Analysis

To establish the most effective design for a company's data network, a clear understanding of the purpose and business benefits must be determined. Departmental networks have often been installed as isolated LANs to support a single groupware application, overlooking the potential for larger corporate-wide applications and services. This narrow view then limits the return on investment of that departmental infrastructure. In merging or expanding these departmental networks, it is also very easy to fall into the "hot technology" trap to make decisions based on equipment features and vendor hype, rather than let the business need drive the basis for the network design.

With a Network Requirement Analysis, a business-oriented view of the network's purpose is taken. This includes the analysis of business tasks and requirements that must be accomplished through the network, as well as a review of the in-house or targeted data applications that the network must support. This analysis will answer key questions such as:

What is the company able to accomplish using the current network that is in place today?
What is the company not able to accomplish without the right network infrastructure in place?

Once gathered, a list of the network requirements is prioritized by importance through a review with key company managers and user representatives. This list now becomes the metric that can be used to measure the success of the subsequent network design and implementation work. This process will ensure that the business will be the key beneficiary of the new network infrastructure.

Architecture and Design

Often data networks are installed in departments and companies without an integrated design to ensure robust functionality. This leads to incompatibilities, performance issues and support problems. Cierra Business Solutions provides a comprehensive Network Architecture and Design project that produces an integrated plan for the implementation of new network elements and connections, or consolidation of existing departmental networks.

The Network Architecture and Design project is individually tailored to each company’s unique scope and needs. Beginning with an analysis of the current infrastructure and documented needs, Cierra Business Solutions will provide a series of recommendations formulated for a high-level, logical network architecture. This includes a comparison of solutions available from various vendors and their particular advantages in meeting the company's particular business needs.

Following a review of the recommended architecture, Cierra Business Solutions provides a detailed Design Document for the complete infrastructure. This includes descriptions of the new network components and its integration with current equipment, network diagrams, bill of materials, installation and configuration recommendations and pricing. The Design Document will remain as a working blueprint for implementation tasks to follow.

Implementation

The implementation of new network components and technologies can be an overwhelming and time-consuming task. Particularly if your in-house staff is limited in their understanding of the new technologies, or are already fully committed with their regular jobs.
A Network Implementation project allows you to augment your in-house expertise to ensure a successful rollout. Beginning with full project planning, priorities and dependencies will be clearly identified to make the least impact on your user community, while optimizing the speed of the implementation. The implementation plan is customized for each company’s environment. To perform the installation work, we can either integrate with your staff or act on their behalf. If your staff is limited in their ability to perform the implementation, shadowing of Cierra Business Solutions’ installation team can provide necessary hands-on familiarity with a gradual transition to in-house ownership. The result is a successful deployment for your company