ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the importance of planning, guidance, and regular maintenance to retain functionality, value, and purpose in the face of the many changes and threats over a network’s life cycle. Although hardware selection and management present the most visible elements of the modern enterprise network, software and services define the boundaries and functions that separate an enterprise from a simple collection of devices. While many small-to-medium-sized organizations may not enjoy adequate resources to create a duplicate network in its entirety, the use of virtualization can allow a limited-capacity equivalent to be set up with minimal hardware investment by creating an entire test network within a small number of host systems. Maintaining a test network that matches the same software packages and configuration settings found in the production environment is important to ensure that updates do not compromise critical application functionality.
