Network Architecture Considerations

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• On-premises networks tend to have high capital costs and low scalability
• Recovery procedures can be complex if the site premises is affected by a large-scale disaster
  • means that availability and resilience can be lower than alternative solutions such as cloud networking

Factors to Consider

• cost
  • acquisition and upgrade of appliances and software require an up-front capital outlay
    • can depreciate and lose value
  • ongoing maintenance and support liabilities
  • value of the investment in security architecture and controls can be calculated based on how much they reduce losses from incidents
• compute and responsiveness
  • minimize processing time for workloads
    • is the processing effort required to complete a task
  • Higher compute resources incur greater costs
• scalability
  • minimize costs when workloads increase or decrease
  • scalable system is one that can quickly or automatically add or remove compute resources without incurring excessive costs
• availability
  • minimizes downtime or maximizes uptime
• resilience and ease of recovery
  • The ability of a system or network to recover quickly from failure events with no or minimal manual intervention
• power
  • ensures the facility can meet the energy demands of its devices and workloads
  • Power usage through higher compute resources increases costs
  • minimizing power failures improves availability
• patch availability
  • ensures that firmware and software code is protected against exploits for known vulnerabilities
  • network owner cannot manage this process when they rely on a third party
• risk transference
  • contract that uses a third party to manage the network infrastructure
  • SLA can be defined with penalties if metrics for responsiveness, scalability, availability, and resilience are not maintained