How Does Your Team Approach Designing a Network Infrastructure That Supports Business Continuity and Growth?
Get the Latest on Modern Networking Technology from the Experts
Implementation focuses on minimal disruption and clear documentation for ongoing management. Our lifecycle approach includes continuous monitoring, periodic performance reviews, and upgrade planning to ensure your network evolves with your business. By combining technical insight with strategic planning, Connection helps organizations build reliable infrastructures that support both day-to-day operations and long-term business goals.
Dan Ryan
Principal Solution Architect
Dan Ryan is a Principal Field Solution Architect specializing in wireless networking at Connection and a Certified Wireless Network Expert (CWNE #351). With nearly two decades in enterprise networking, he helps organizations design and operate reliable, scalable wireless networks that advance business goals. Dan is passionate about education, frequently speaks at industry events, and is known for making complex wireless concepts clear and practical.Read Full Transcript
Designing a network infrastructure for business continuity and growth really requires balancing your current needs with future requirements, while at the same time building in resilience at every single layer, right?
First off, we don’t start with ports and part numbers—we start with outcomes. What absolutely just can’t go down? Which applications define “good” for your users? And then we turn those answers into clear SLOs for latency, jitter, and recovery time. So now, we’re designing to a measurable standard.
From there, we map critical business processes to network dependencies, and we can identify single points of failure upfront. This gives us a blueprint that keeps operations simple, even when the underlying infrastructure is really, really complex.
On top of that, your resilience is going to be our next pillar. So we design failure domains so that when something breaks, the business only slows down instead of just completely stopping. This means diverse carriers and paths for Internet, redundant power, redundant uplinks wherever they matter, and then architectures that fail over automatically and gracefully.
We pair all of this with a modular approach, right? The standard site patterns for branches. We have different ones for campus and edge, and that way, when you’re growing, it’s “add another of these” rather than redesign everything. And this gives you this really clear path to scale without introducing even more chaos.
Security is built in from the ground up, right? Users, devices, applications—all get identity-based access with least privileged policies enforced across the entire infrastructure. Segmentation, however, is not just an afterthought. It’s the default.
Day-to-day changes are now automated. Golden templates, pre-change checks, zero-touch turn-ups, and post-change tests that prove the outcome of everything. If we can’t test it, we don’t call it done.
We assure continuously by streaming telemetry tied to user experience, those synthetic tests for all of the apps that you care about, and alerts that explain to you what’s broken and for whom it’s broken, right? Not just, “ah, the CPU is high” or something like that.
On top of that, capacity planning meets you where your traffic lives. On your Wi-Fi, we plan for airtime and concurrency, not just signal strength. On the wire, we also validate our PoE budgets, our switch uplinks, and make sure that we have enough headroom before those become bottlenecks.
Our WAN—we also need to make sure that we’re taking advantage of app-aware routing so that performance, not just prefixes, drives path selection.
And then finally, we practice failure on purpose. Tabletop exercises, scheduled failovers, restore drills, backups that we’ve actually restored, right? We document what we build, we keep diagrams aligned with what’s actually there, and deliver a simple growth guide for each site pattern, each one of those architectures that we’ve built, so that the network stays manageable as it expands.
The result of this is a network that’s predictable on bad days and essentially invisible on good ones. This supports the business that you have today and gives you a confident, low-drama path to add your sites, add your users, add your services in the future. And all of that is growth by design, not by accident.
Designing a network infrastructure for business continuity and growth really requires balancing your current needs with future requirements, while at the same time building in resilience at every single layer, right?
First off, we don’t start with ports and part numbers—we start with outcomes. What absolutely just can’t go down? Which applications define “good” for your users? And then we turn those answers into clear SLOs for latency, jitter, and recovery time. So now, we’re designing to a measurable standard.
From there, we map critical business processes to network dependencies, and we can identify single points of failure upfront. This gives us a blueprint that keeps operations simple, even when the underlying infrastructure is really, really complex.
On top of that, your resilience is going to be our next pillar. So we design failure domains so that when something breaks, the business only slows down instead of just completely stopping. This means diverse carriers and paths for Internet, redundant power, redundant uplinks wherever they matter, and then architectures that fail over automatically and gracefully.
We pair all of this with a modular approach, right? The standard site patterns for branches. We have different ones for campus and edge, and that way, when you’re growing, it’s “add another of these” rather than redesign everything. And this gives you this really clear path to scale without introducing even more chaos.
Security is built in from the ground up, right? Users, devices, applications—all get identity-based access with least privileged policies enforced across the entire infrastructure. Segmentation, however, is not just an afterthought. It’s the default.
Day-to-day changes are now automated. Golden templates, pre-change checks, zero-touch turn-ups, and post-change tests that prove the outcome of everything. If we can’t test it, we don’t call it done.
We assure continuously by streaming telemetry tied to user experience, those synthetic tests for all of the apps that you care about, and alerts that explain to you what’s broken and for whom it’s broken, right? Not just, “ah, the CPU is high” or something like that.
On top of that, capacity planning meets you where your traffic lives. On your Wi-Fi, we plan for airtime and concurrency, not just signal strength. On the wire, we also validate our PoE budgets, our switch uplinks, and make sure that we have enough headroom before those become bottlenecks.
Our WAN—we also need to make sure that we’re taking advantage of app-aware routing so that performance, not just prefixes, drives path selection.
And then finally, we practice failure on purpose. Tabletop exercises, scheduled failovers, restore drills, backups that we’ve actually restored, right? We document what we build, we keep diagrams aligned with what’s actually there, and deliver a simple growth guide for each site pattern, each one of those architectures that we’ve built, so that the network stays manageable as it expands.
The result of this is a network that’s predictable on bad days and essentially invisible on good ones. This supports the business that you have today and gives you a confident, low-drama path to add your sites, add your users, add your services in the future. And all of that is growth by design, not by accident.
