Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/58400
www.iltanet.org Building an Invisible Network by Jon Castle of SNR Denton Jon Castle is the Lead Architect & Engineer of Global Networks at SNR Denton, where he is responsible for the design and operation of the firm's global network. Jon has 22 years of experience in computer networking in a wide variety of industries and is a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE #2562). Jon is a member of ILTA's Communications Technologies Peer Group Steering Committee. He can be reached at jon.castle@snrdenton.com. Lawyers are aware of many IT elements — mainly the ones they need to get their jobs done: their PCs, PDAs, email messages and telephones. However, there are other IT elements that lawyers should never have to be aware of, such as server technology, databases and the network. Indeed, the network is one of those things that is absolutely vital to a legal organization, and yet no lawyer should have to think about the existence of the network. Like an electrical outlet, the user should just connect to the network and it should always work, with no need to know any of the details of how the network is delivered. IT can take steps to make your network invisible to lawyers. Never again should you hear, "The network is down." 6 ILTA White Paper Network Resiliency Building maximum network resiliency is probably the most important strategy for making the network invisible. Look at network diagrams and put your finger over various elements and ask, "What happens if this fails?" Build redundancies around the elements that have the biggest impact on users. Budget constraints are often justifications for a lack of redundancy. Use single points-of-failure downtime costs to help justify the price of redundancy. There is often evidence to show that it costs more in lost productivity to have a network down for several hours than it does to obtain redundant network elements. The speed of failover to resilient elements is also important. People will notice any outage that lasts more