Summary
What is the purpose of the network? To ensure business success! This chapter went into great detail on how a network designer can accomplish this.
This chapter covered how businesses rely heavily on the network and the corresponding services and applications riding on it. This chapter also covered application and service models, showing how the location and architecture of the application or service directly affect the required network design elements. In addition, this chapter highlighted the multitude of cloud options and the associated advantages of each option. This chapter highlighted the preference for agnostic cloud services over proprietary cloud services, to ensure a business doesn’t lock itself into a specific cloud service provider, and how adopting a service-oriented architecture can be beneficial to the business. Last but not least, this chapter gave a quick overview of the importance of data and data management by highlighting the 11 data management pillars. Ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of a business’s data is paramount to the business’s success. If a business’s data is compromised, it can no longer make valid decisions on that data, which handicaps the business until the data is fixed.