Does your network diagram look like a plate of spaghetti? Do you even have a network diagram? In many businesses, networks grow haphazardly. First two devices get connected, then two more, then more, and eventually, it creates an unmanageable tangle of cables. If you haven’t rethought your network design in a while, now is a good time to take a step back and see if you can straighten out that mess. The first question to ask is, what infrastructure do you already have? This means pulling out any existing documentation to identify servers, switches, routers, and other connected devices. If you don’t have documentation, you may need to crawl around in the computer room and trace cable routes to see how things are currently working. Next, ask what demands your network needs to support. This means identifying the applications your users work with and the bandwidth those applications require. Your network likely needs to accommodate file servers and print servers along with dat...