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.