Fill in the Blank Form Needed for Network Assessment

November 16, 2008 5:33 PM

I have a friend who has a small business and wants me to perform a LAN/WAN Network Assessment. It's something I never done before but I'm fully capable. Instead of me reinventing the wheel does anyone have fill in the blank forms or links to forms with questions I should ask and what I should inventory? Thanks!
posted by bleucube to computers & internet (4 comments total)

"wants me to perform a LAN/WAN Network Assessment"

That sounds, um, a bit vague. What are you assessing? Efficiency? Performance? Stability? Reliability? Fault-tolerance? Security? Cost-effectiveness? There's probably some boilerplate out there (particularly as regards security and performance matters) if you can pin down what the scope of assessment is.
posted by majick at 6:07 PM on November 16, 2008

Yeah, if it's a small business it's probably only a LAN not a WAN (though not necessarily). Like majick says, "assessment" seems vague here. Will it include the end user PCs? Laptop security? Latency? Patch management? There are 1001 things you could be looking at here and if you don't really know salient things to look for first then you might end up with a heap of useless data.
posted by Burhanistan at 7:51 PM on November 16, 2008

A good starting point for all of this is the ISO 27000-series frameworks.
posted by TheNewWazoo at 9:40 PM on November 16, 2008

Sorry about the vagueness, but the scope is pretty broad. My friend has two offices in town and they are connected via VPN. The assessment would include:

* Inventory
- Workstations, servers, laptops, PDA’s, software, operating systems, printers, routers, switches…. Etc

* Create diagrams
- Wiring diagrams (network and telephone), routing diagrams….etc

* Security Audit
- Disaster recovery, backups, anti-virus, firewalls, patch levels…etc

* Licenses compliance
- They have a sneaking suspicion the last tech guy used pirated software

* Examine how they use technology and see if there is ways to improve business performance. This would include performance, reliability and cost-effectiveness.

Any boilerplate material would be helpful!
posted by bleucube at 3:44 AM on November 17, 2008