What Is an Enterprise Network?

Enterprise network refers to the physical, virtual, or logical connectivity of the organization’s users, devices, systems, and applications.

Enterprise Network Definition

Enterprise network refers to the physical, virtual, or logical connectivity of the organization’s users, devices, systems, and applications.

How does enterprise networking work?

An enterprise network is the organization's backbone. It enables users and systems to connect easily via different connectivity modes such as LAN or cloud. However, this requires advanced and efficient switching and routing devices to transfer business-critical data between servers, applications, desktops, and more.

What are the components of an enterprise network?

With the advancements of modern hybrid cloud environments, organizations face additional network security challenges like internal firewalls. Enterprise networking solutions play a crucial role in delivering seamless connectivity across advanced, hybrid, and multi-cloud networks.

In fact, advanced enterprise networks include both security and networking as a common platform to provide various services such as firewalls, load balancing, and Wi-Fi. This converged approach facilitates end-to-end network automation and helps eliminate operational silos.

Using unique network solutions, organizations can focus more on workflows, consumer demands, production processes, and logistics. As a result, they can achieve high productivity, increased efficiency through uninterrupted collaboration, controlled access to the company's resources, optimized user experience, seamless cloud integration, enhanced security, low costs, and more.

An enterprise network consists of:

  • Endpoints (systems, mobile devices, servers)
  • Network devices (bridges, routers, switches, firewalls, and storage)
  • Communications protocols
  • Local Area Networks (LANs)
  • Wide Area Networks (WANs)

What is enterprise network architecture?

Enterprise network architecture refers to a specific setup and layout of enterprise network design vital for running business-critical assets. It provides support to tasks, such as VoIP and telecommunications systems, data storage, data analysis, and more. System administrators use visual modes to gain insights into different network components such as firewall, network switches, routers, and more. Enterprise network architecture is important to ensure all the network components are connected to deliver services.

Enterprise network architecture includes separate but connected constituent domains, such as:

  • Data center and hybrid clouds
  • Wide-area networks (WANs)
  • Campus, branch, and Internet of Things (IoT)

How to monitor enterprise network performance

Enterprise networks can be monitored in three ways.

SNMP-based monitoring: SNMP is an internet standard protocol used to monitor the performance of network devices. It scans, collects, and organizes crucial information about managed devices on IP networks, such as CPU utilization and free disk space. You can use this information to change device behavior and enhance performance.
Passive analysis: Passive monitoring refers to the analysis of network traffic to determine its utilization. It captures network traffic for predictive analysis, application performance management, and to monitor performance trends. This technique is often used to check what applications and websites are consuming the most bandwidth.
Active monitoring: Active network monitoring refers to the technique used to monitor the performance of networks and applications. It’s done by injecting test traffic into the network to monitor the path and destination of the traffic. This type of monitoring is also known as synthetic monitoring.
One of the best techniques to monitor enterprise network performance is to use a powerful and efficient network performance monitoring solution to detect, diagnose, troubleshoot network outages quickly.

Benefits of using a network performance monitoring tool include:

  • Automatically detects network performance outages, speeds up troubleshooting, and reduces downtime
  • Simplifies and streamlines the management of complex network devices
  • Performs hop-by-hop analysis for cloud enterprise network, on-premises, and hybrid environments
  • Improves operational efficiency with intuitive dashboards, elaborated reports, and real-time alerts
  • Analyzes root cause by visualizing correlation across network devices
  • Automatically discovers and maps devices, performance metrics, wireless coverage, and link utilization
  • Performs hardware health monitoring on key devices, including fan speed, temperature, and power supply
  • Generates customizable reports

How to manage enterprise network device configuration

Network configuration management refers to the entire lifecycle of a device within a network. Every device goes through a configuration process such as inventory management, device discovery, configuration backup, monitoring changes, and more. Managing enterprise network configurations is crucial to maintain accurate network configurations. This helps organizations avoid potential outages within the network.

As it’s difficult to manage or track a network and a huge number of connected devices manually, many organizations prefer using network configuration tools. Configuration automation tools make the network robust, safe, and highly productive.

Network configuration management tools help to:

  • Take automated backups of your configuration files
  • Track configuration changes in real-time
  • Encrypt and store configuration files
  • Recover from network disasters instantaneously
  • Automate both simple and complex network operations
  • Record a history of configuration changes
  • Reduce configuration errors
  • Save time spent on repetitive tasks
  • Generate elaborated reports on changes, inventory, compliance, and other vital network parameters
  • Provide role-based access control

Common features of network configuration management software include:

Network device discovery: Network device discovery is a crucial step in network configuration management and provides in-depth visibility into network devices. It requires a detailed view into the device specifics such as interface details, hardware specifics, serial numbers, interface details, port configurations, and more. The information helps your admins demonstrate compliance and conduct regular audits.
Automated Configuration backup: Network configuration backup is important to ensure your network devices are safe from security breaches and potential outages. Configuration backup enables you to overwrite a faulty configuration with a trusted version from the backup. You can also automate configuration backups during network outages.
Configuration viewing, tracking, and comparison: With the help of network configuration tools, you can easily track, monitor, analyze, and compare network configurations. Moreover, you can get detailed reports on network devices and configuration changes over a specified time. These reports let you compare current configurations with the baseline configurations and alerts you when the changes are discovered.
Related Resources
What is Network Administration?
Network administration aims to manage, monitor, maintain, secure, and service an organization’s network.
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