Summary

In responding to a request for proposal (RFP) or when presenting a design document to showcase your design, include five sections in your presentation. First, your executive summary should be brief and should target the company executives. Your design requirements address the customer’s needs and the current network. The design solution section is where you describe your new network design. The summary is where you summarize your design solutions. Finally, the appendixes contain contact information and any additional details the customer might need.

Pilot and prototype implementations are partial implementations of the overall internetwork that you can use to prove your concepts to your customer. There are five steps to a pilot implementation, which is smaller in scale than a prototype. These steps include testing the design, investigating what your competitors will be proposing, writing a script for the demonstration, practicing the demonstration, and scheduling time with the customer and presenting the demonstration.

There are seven steps to a prototype implementation, which is larger than a pilot but smaller than the overall internetwork. These seven steps are reviewing customer requirements, defining the scale of the prototype, investigating what your competitors will be proposing, developing a test plan, purchasing and configuring all the necessary equipment, practicing the prototype demonstration, and conducting final tests and demonstrations.

Cisco’s ECN (Enterprise Composite Network) model is a design philosophy developed by Cisco that includes the SAFE (Secure Blueprint for Enterprise Networks) using Cisco switches, routers, VPN concentrators, access servers, firewalls, and so on. The principle behind Cisco’s ECN model is a modular approach to security design.