What impacts could be expected if a portion of an organization’s network capacity is inadequate? How would you determine if an organization’s network capacity is adequate or inadequate?
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The organizational network is fully operational for effective functionality. The network promotes effective communication and transfer of organizational sensitive information. Malfunctions and inadequacy of a network’s portion can lead to two major problems: performance and security (Huang et al., 2022). Performance problems include the failure of the network to deliver its intended objectives such as communication and data storage and backup. Meanwhile, security problems include increased vulnerability of the network to hacking and other illegal activities such as eavesdropping (Hashemi & Zarei, 2020). Organizational network incapacity can be identified through troubleshooting and if there are signs of abnormal functionality such as delayed messages.
References
Hashemi, S., & Zarei, M. (2020). Internet of Things backdoors: Resource management issues, security challenges, and detection methods. Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies. https://doi.org/10.1002/ett.4142
Huang, Y., Wu, J., Tse, C. K., & Zheng, Z. (2022). Sequential Attacker–Defender Game on Complex Networks Considering the Cascading Failure Process. IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, 9(2), 518–529. https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSS.2021.3099718
Hi Samuel,
Expanding on what you said about network troubleshooting, there are several tools available that can help in diagnosing network issues. There are several paid tools such as SolarWinds that allow for administrative configuration as well as network diagnostic and there are several free tools and command prompt commands that can help in network diagnostics such as Wireshark, Ping, Tracert, Nslookup, and more.
If a networks capacity is inadequate, this could be detrimental to the business depending on what occurs after the network is “out of capacity”. This could be applications on the network, server storage, and data storage to name a few. Reaching network capacity could result in fines if certain data is retained/couldn’t be retained due to capacity limits. Fines in turn could also harm the company’s reputation.
To determine if an organizations network capacity is adequate or not, capacity testing can be performed. A capacity test includes adding the new bandwidth requirements to current peak and average bandwidth usages. In addition to capacity testing, monitoring the network capacity to ensure if the capacity is getting close to the max is essential.
Hi Jill,
I like your inclusion of potential fines due to network capacity being reached or by going beyond the network capacity. Some cloud providers such as Google or Amazon do impose extra fines if the utilized storage space is beyond the original plan. As such, making sure the network is not only adequate but also not exceeding the capacity is essential in maintaining a good network environment.
Hello Jill,
I liked the point you raised about how reaching network capacity may lead into fines if certain data is retained due to capacity limits. This is very crucial to any organization in order to stay out of the news and protect their reputation.
There are multiple aspects that go into networking. The topography, the ingress/egress of traffic, the filters for said traffic. The firewalls that dictate the kind of traffic and over which port. The hardware used to counteract attacks and help with redundancy. The list goes on and on. If portions of an organization’s network and that of its security is poorly configured, you open pandora’s box. There is a plethora of different “worse case scenarios” that can play out. These stem from low maximum concurrent user sessions limiting productivity to DDoS attacks rendering availability to zero. The threat landscape for both inbound and outbound traffic needs to be considered and properly assessed in order to minimize congestion/downtime/threats/etc. A stress test can demonstrate what a network can and can’t handle under load. The networks response time coupled with available bandwidth and the number of users accessing resources can all be simulated for adequacy.
I think you make a good point that if capacity is exceeded far enough, you can essentially denial-of-service yourself. At this point your users become the threat to their own availability.
Question 1: What impacts could be expected if a portion of an organization’s network capacity is inadequate? How would you determine if an organization’s network capacity is adequate or inadequate?
If the organization’s network capacity is inadequate, the most obvious impact will be slowdowns and eventually data loss. The network infrastructure will attempt to handle data flow but at some point that network will be overwhelmed and packets will be dropped. As capacity is approached, the network will lose resilience. The extra capacity in a network can be a buffer against denial of service, because when capacity is exceeded, maliciously or not, the result is still lost data and users without access.
Network testing tools can be used to test for and ensure adequate capacity. Many of these tools are are provided for free by networking gear companies or even built into switching and routing devices. System-wide data gathering tools and administration tools can also be leveraged to get information about network health and capacity.
While the rule is always to have “enough” capacity and there are some rules of thumb, the exact definition of that is determined on a case-by-case basis. there is a cost/benefit analysis to be done to balance against risk profiles to establish how much is enough.
Hi David,
I agree that having extra capacity is helpful in mitigating potential denial of service attacks. Expanding on this, configuring the network properly also is essential in not only mitigating denial of service attacks, but also other forms of attacks against the network. For example, rate limiting to limit the amount of traffic going to a network interface and filtering upstream requests prevents malicious packets from reaching the network.
If an organization does not have adequate network capacity the availabilty of information is going to be compromised. The system or information could be slow, time-out, or experience an outage. Customers will be unable to access websites and employees might be unable to access information needed to perform their jobs. This could lead to the organization not being able to meet its business objectives, regulatroy non-compliance, and or financial losses and reputation loss. Network capacity can be checked by reviewing performance and utilizing performance monitoring tools and reports. In addition, the organization can determine the bandwidth required and ensure there is more than enough to meet the usage needs. This can be periodically assessed to determine if any changes need to be made.
Hi Christa,
I agree with you that if an organization does not have adequate network capacity the availability of information is going to be compromised. Because the information needed to perform effectively is not available in addition to that during that period of inadequacy system and data can be compromised
I agree with your statements regarding network capacity can be reviewed by using monitoring tools and reports. I also like that you included the bandwidth requirement, and that the bandwidth can be assessed periodically in addition to monitoring. Monitoring can alert that capacity is nearing max, but if this happens often, it could be that the bandwidth needs to be increased. I think both of these controls/processes are important to consider in regard to network capacity.
When an organization network capacity is inadequate it drags down the business and causes a lot of performance issues that can be frustrating and also expensive at the same time. Employees and the IT team will have to struggle to function in a workday because of it. Unexpected costs can also arise for the repairs, and time will be wasted while waiting for IT support services. There are a lot of circumstances that cause inadequate network performance. Some of these roots from security breaches, faulty switches, routers, firewalls, and so much more. These problems can indeed cause a headache. Therefore, it is best to learn and understand what can go wrong and how the issues can be fixed timely to avoid loss of valuable information.
If a portion of an organization’s network capacity is inadequate, there is potential for performance issues that can impact the user experience or result in data loss. At worst, an inadequate network capacity could result in an application being entirely unused due to the poor performance of the application.
In determining if an organization’s network capacity is adequate, network tests can be performed to measure some factors such as response times, packet loss, timeouts, connectivity, and more. Diagnostic tools such as Wireshark can be utilized in determining how well a network is performing.
Hello Kenneth,
You raised a good point about utilizing certain tools such as Wireshark. Wireshark gives a clear picture and performance level of your network which then will help in determining whether the network capacity the organization is adequate.
An organization may be affected heavily when they happen to operate with inadequate network capacity. Certain things that may be impacted are system slowing down during regular processes, systems completely shut down, poor performance that lead to poor quality and affect data flow. And, to some extend, some system may be impacted to the level that they become very expensive to fix.
In order to determine whether the organization has adequate or inadequate network capacity, a periodical performance scan/check, network scan to check the traffic. It is recommended as it gives an idea of what is a reasonable network capacity that can handle the organization’s workload.
I agree with an organization to put a process in place to scan/check networks and the traffic. I do think this should be continuous monitoring and not just periodically, due to someone would need to be notified or alerted if something came up on the scan and have time to react/fix to ensure the network isn’t brought down.
There could be multiple things that could be impacted if the organizations network capacity is inadequate such as slowing down information that is coming in, stay up to date on things on a regular basis. There could be a loss of data leading to have an issue with accurate data overall any of these causes can lead to work that is less effective. There will also be the issue of in the orderly manner the work gets and there could be cases we could be spending more time on things that should be done quicker. In order to fix this I would keep check on the organizations network capacity by how much time is taking to get work done. There are clear sign when work is not being done or the information is not correct leading to the conclusion that network capacity has some sort of issue. I would also compare the data from past timelines and current timelines to help determine what is the root cause.
An inadequate network capacity can result in many issues due to the network being the primary link between the company and its customers as well as the internal employees. The resulting slower network can lead to downtime, packet loss, and slow response times, all of which slow down critical functions. This will lead to revenue losses as well as hurt the company’s reputation. An inadequate network also leaves the company vulnerable to DDoS attacks, where attacks overwhelm the network shutting out actual users, and leading to more downtime.
To determine the adequacy of a network, the company must run capacity tests to figure out important statistics like average, max, and min users. Using this information the network’s infrastructure can be configured appropriately. Conducting a stress test would also help inform the company how its network behaves at max capacity. Fixing these problems in a simulated and deliberate way helps the company both save money and protect its network.
Inadequate capacity can typically lead to slowing data retrieval and uploading due to the lack of resources allocated to that portion. It can also lead to overall data loss and perhaps even errors if the network can’t handle the number of people trying to use it at once. It can finally lead to complete inactivity from some users who might not be able to get any bandwidth to perform basic computing over the network. One of the ways you can test to see if a network is adequate is to take surveys on users’ overall experience and response time from the internet and to also do a local network assessment to ensure the architecture of their private network is as efficient as possible.
Hi Matthew,
I like that you pointed out that taking user surveys could be helpful in determining the adequacy of the network. Network tests may yield passing results but if the people who are using the network are reporting it is still slow then the company must look into increasing bandwidth and/or doing some upgrades.