What is Network Assessment?

Network Assessment Definition

A network assessment is a validation of the existing IT infrastructure, processes, security, compliance, management, and performance of the organization. This gives an understanding of the health and state of your IT infrastructure, allowing you to check the areas that need improvement. By doing so, you make more long-term, future-proof business decisions.

When the organization is uncertain of the IT infrastructure, network assessment is critical to completely analyze the network components as it also helps the organization gain valuable insights before implementing any new process, systems, and infrastructure.

An enterprise network involves workstations, laptops, desktops, smartphones, servers, and other endpoints. A network assessment checks the IT infrastructure, management, security, and processes that are part of the network inventory – to detect the devices and users connected to the network. It will also help you identify the compliance factors and examine the network vulnerability for software bugs.

What Does a Network Assessment Identify?

A network assessment helps to detect and troubleshoot IT issues more quickly. But it focuses mainly on the following areas.

Minimum and maximum usage of resources – the requirement and the usage of resources are different for each department within an organization. Network assessment comes in handy to examine and understand the requirement of each department, allowing the company to allocate resources accordingly.

Bandwidth glitches – when users run multiple applications, stream videos, and download large files, it consumes a large amount of bandwidth network, slowing down the network. A network assessment can help detect such errors and glitches.

Serious security issues – which need immediate attention can easily be detected through network assessment. This helps avoid security challenges that can impact the network system.

Potential advantages and associated risk – a network assessment helps you understand if the implementation of new technologies is compatible with the existing network configuration.

Why Network Assessment Is Important?

Network assessments allow MSPs to understand the status of the company network before taking up a contract service, making it an essential component in understanding the seriousness of the issues.

Expand New Clients

Executing a network assessment on a client network will help MSP understand the status of the network and the potential security risks associated with it. An effective network assessment tool should provide a clear picture of the network through XP Migration Readiness Report, Change Management Report, Full Detail Report, Excel Export Report, and Asset Detail Report.

Purpose of Reports

Network assessment tools help provide detailed reports about security flaws and various system issues. The MSPs can take advantage of the reports to provide efficient solutions through billable projects. They could also generate reports regularly to view the network status and take necessary steps to fix the issues.

The XP Migration Readiness report helps to detect if the computers within the network are running on Windows XP. As it is already obsolete, computers can be prone to vulnerable exploits. MSP can help upgrade the OS to secure the computers.

The Asset Detail Report helps MSPs to get complete information about the assets that are connected to the client’s network. Therefore, it provides an automatic inventory module that can be exported to excel to perform further examination.

Three Stages of Network Assessment

There are three different stages of Network Assessment

• Preparation – defines the scope of the network assessment process.
• Performance of the Assessment – it is then processed which includes archiving network assets, results of assessments, and security issues through the inventory module.
• Post-Assessment – finally, the post-assessment involves report generation.