Office Network: Effective Communication Infrastructure in the Company
When running a company where dozens of employees work, it's worth spending a significant amount of time preparing the network infrastructure in the office properly. Although in principle it can be said that the network in a company is the same as at home, except that more people use it, in practice there are many more issues to consider than might initially seem.
Oct 21, 2023 | updated: 4:45 AM EDT, October 23, 2023
From the outset, it needs to be understood that an office network should first and foremost be more convenient in management and scalable, which is not always an important argument at home. In a company, configuring devices, setting access rules to selected resources, printer availability or finally adding new network elements will be a daily occurrence if a new room with desks or a new server room requires it.
It is also necessary to properly select devices. As a rule of thumb, it can be said that all "typical routers" and access points offered to home users simply won't be able to handle the challenge of servicing an office network. The issue will quickly become both the surprisingly limited number of settings on such systems, and performance issues, when dozens of people start using the device regularly, something we never experience at home.
Central management and PoE
Wanting to create a user-friendly office network, it is best to reach for remotely managed systems from the outset. The administrator of such a network not only does not have to individually configure all switches or access points, but also saves time when diagnosing faults or adding additional network devices to the existing network. Some of the main components of such a system, in addition to the router, are switches and it is best to choose those that offer PoE power in advance.
PoE is nothing more than power delivery via an ethernet cable. Many network devices are compatible with this standard, including most importantly, Wi-Fi points or cameras. As a result, in the office, you can hang an access point anywhere a LAN cable has been led and not worry about power. The equipment will receive power through the same cable as the network signal, of course, as long as the switch selected earlier supports this standard and provides sufficient power.
"Security thanks to subnets"
When network devices have already been planned and installed, proper configuration is necessary. The basis is the creation of subnets and access rules for specific employees to selected resources. Thanks to this, selected people will be able, for example, to operate the printer and read data from the NAS in a given office, but information from the company server may not necessarily be visible to them - unless they are needed in everyday work.
On a similar principle, a subnet can be used to create an additional Wi-Fi network for customers, in which local devices are not visible at all and it only provides access to the internet - this is a mechanism also well known from medium and high-end home routers.
Naturally, regardless of the scale of a given network infrastructure, one should not forget about the broadly understood administration, including routine problem solving with traffic or the installation of security updates. Centralized systems usually have such advanced software that it significantly facilitates this process, suggesting for example, which Wi-Fi access points are overloaded, so in the future consider purchasing a more efficient device or another one in a location where coverage is slightly poorer.
