Identifying Customer Design Requirements

Exam: Cisco 640-864 - Designing for Cisco Internetwork Solutions (DESGN)

For identifying the exact requirements of a customer, the first step is to talk to the various stakeholders in the network. The primary stakeholders that can help understand the design requirements in the best possible manner are:

• Network Engineers;
• Business personnel and
• Managers.

Identifying Customer Requirements

The primary objective of developing networks is to provide support to applications and talking to the above stakeholders allows determination of network services that need to be supported. The following steps can help in identification of customer requirements:

Once the above mentioned steps are completed, the data is analyzed and a network design developed.

The existing and the planned applications need to be identified. It is equally important to identify the importance of every application. A table that identifies the applications should contain information on the following:

• Planned Application Types;
• Concrete Applications;
• Business Importance and
• Comment.

It is important that information be gathered about the planned infrastructure services. Virtualization, mobility, unified communications, high availability, network management, quality of service and security are the network services that are included.

For the purpose of organizational goals, it is important to identify the goals of the company. The goals of a company could be enhanced support to customers, addition of new services, increased competitiveness or reduction of costs. A combination of goals could play an important role in determining the organizational goals.

Organizational constraints pertain to budget, policy, personnel and scheduling. A company may be limited by a time line or a budget.

Technical goals lend support to the objectives of the organization and support applications. Some of the technical goals could be:

• Improving on response time;
• Reduced downtime;
• Simplifying management of the network;
• Increased reliability;
• Up-gradation of technology
• Improving on scalability.

Some of the technical constraints that may influence decisions are:

• Insufficiency of existing wiring to support new technologies;
• Insufficient bandwidth for supporting new technologies;
• Compatibility of applications.