Business is built on networks. Sure, most modern businesses rely on Cisco to power their digital networks, but businesses cannot succeed without the types of networks the pre-date Cisco, Microsoft and even Bulletproof! Those networks are your networks of contacts, friends, business associates and family. Building and maintaining those networks can be challenging, especially when we get wrapped up in the social media hype of 'I have more friends than you', but understanding both the importance and correct size of those (hopefully) vibrant social networks is as critical to the success of our businesses as is having a reliable and robust computer network.

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Over the past 2 weeks I have had the incredible privilege to enjoy the company of a number of local business owners who are, in my opinion, experts in their fields. The purpose of our weekly lunchtime meet-ups is to discuss social media, its implications on businesses, and how to harness the opportunities that this new media offers.

One of the curiousities of our meetings is the perception of experts. Each one of us is an expert in our own right, and yet we rarely perceive ourselves as such. The facilitator of our meetings, Rob Paterson, often says that it is those who proclaim themselves infallible experts are the very experts that we should avoid. With that hanging over our heads we muddle along, discussing ways to connect with our customers, expand the reach of our individual businesses, and discover how to be more engaged in the communities that support us. Ever the consummate observer, I have realized that in spite of our reluctance to proclaim ourselves experts, our collective knowledge, experience, and connectedness (more on that in a later post) makes the collective 'us' an expert. Confused? Let me explain.

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Over the past 8 months or so I have had the privilege of working with a BICSI certified Registered Communications Distribution Designer (RCDD) as part of a project assignment.  Having learned about the importance of cable management in a previous life in the automotive industry, I was immediately taken by his thoughtful and dedicated approach to the art of cable management.  While your server and network cabinets may not look like this, the reality is that they probably don't look nearly as good as this layout or this installation as many of us don't spend enough time considering the importance of proper cable management as part of an overall project.

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Bulletproof is currently doing a a big push to embrace social media and allow our customers to get more intimately involved with our company through direct interaction.

As a security guy, social media is scary. So, why would I choose to join the social media team and push this forward? The first reason is simple, the move to social media is going to happen to all of us,  regardless. The second reason is because I think we're doing all of the right things to use the technology responsibly.

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Networks come in all shapes and sizes, differing in complexity and services offered, yet they all share one common element -- if they go down your business comes to a grinding halt. Regardless of the size of the network, restoring service becomes 'priority one' during a service outage. For anyone who has had a piece of hardware fail in the middle of the night, that panicked feeling, clouded by lack of sleep, makes rebuilding a router or switch from scratch a painful process, but it doesn't have to be that way.

SolarWinds has a fantastic tool called the SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager . By automatically archiving the configs of your network devices, NCM gives you peace of mind know that the latest running, or startup, config is at your finger tips. It might not seem like much, but a recently archived config is salvation when faced with the thought that the last time you performed a manual backup of the config was 6 months ago -- before redesigned your network to handle that streaming video service!

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There is nothing more grand than a beautifully configured Cisco network carelessly streaming video, voice and everything in between.  Any modern business would be hard-pressed to do without their network.  Even a brief outage, let alone an extended outage due to equipment failure, would impact productivity in your business, yet often the Cisco networks that we build function so well that customers sometimes forget that these highly complex information interchanges are not "Plug and Play".  Granted, the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) for a Cisco Catalyst 2960-48TT is pegged at 339,743 hours (or approximately 38 years, 9 months) and, coupled with Cisco's SmartNet service for software upgrades and hardware replacement, you have covered everything that you can from the hardware side, but when something does happen, how will you know?  Perhaps more important, how will you know before something happens

Every network admin, architect and engineer can relate stories of the unexpected and undetected wrecking havoc on a Monday morning.  From weekend lightning storms that can damage equipment to that construction crew down the street that just sliced through your service provider's fiber bundle; the unexpected does happen.  While those are catastrophic events that, as long as they happen during your "standard business hours", someone is bound to notice, more subtle dangers lurk for your shiny new network, especially when nobody is watching.  New applications and services for internal and external customers can place unexpected loads on your network, particularly when implementing new features across WAN connected offices.  New servers, disaster recovery processes and procedures or even that summer intern downloading the latest episode of Heros in high-defintion - they all have the potential to change your humming network into an off-key rendition of our national anthem.  So, what do you do?

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