Chapter 3: LAN Restoration Planning

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3.1 Introduction

Over the years, corporate computing has moved from the centralized mainframe model toward a distributed model that facilitates information sharing, enhances decision-making at all levels in the organization, and improves response time to market conditions. The growing reliance specifically on LANs has its advantages. Primarily, it empowers individuals to be productive and responsive, which shows up in corporate profitability and competitiveness. At the same time, the distributed computing environment brings with it a new set of challenges.

With data and applications residing in many more places and linked together via LANs, it becomes harder to protect vital information from loss, damage, or theft. It is also more difficult to monitor network performance, isolate problems, and implement corrective measures. Failing to give adequate attention to LAN restoral planning can result in poor performance, data loss, more frequent outages, and prolonged network downtime. Fortunately, a number of solutions are available to address these problems.

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