What Is a Network Feasibility Report?

A network feasibility report examines your network project and determines the estimated capital and operational expenses and how these costs affect the project’s financial sustainability. It seeks to uncover, investigate, and assess the project’s solutions and techniques to avoid wasting time and resources on a failed endeavor. It should address crucial parts of the project, such as the required resources, the technology needed to assure its success, the success criteria, and the expected return on investment. In some instances, a project may be completely unfeasible due to several variables that you must be able to identify early on. And while the venture may not be profitable, a well-written network feasibility analysis can still be used to discover potential workarounds, solutions, and alternatives that the developer might pursue to reach the predicted objective. Also, feasibility reports assess the environment with which the project will interact. External obstacles may hurt progress or future issues that you must anticipate and be prepared to address. Feasibility reports provide insightful information regarding your project’s future accomplishments and success. According to a poll, sixty-one percent of small businesses still need a defined budget. With a budget, you may be aware of your firm’s performance.

Benefits of Network Assessment

It is simple to visualize the advantages of a high-performance computing environment, which range from increased agility to enhanced security. What can be more difficult to see is the value of conducting a thorough analysis of network health and outlining a clear improvement strategy. The following are the advantages of a comprehensive network assessment:

Observe the status of your IT infrastructure: An in-depth analysis of your current IT infrastructure, including topology maps and local traffic pattern analysis, can help ensure that decisions regarding network maintenance and upgrades are well-informed. With accurate assessments of current infrastructure assets, such as maintenance status, capabilities, and weaknesses, your team can increase the survivability of optimal systems and phase out those that do not meet requirements.Develop a strategic plan for your IT systems and personnel: Your team can pinpoint opportunities for network consolidation, simplification, automation, and possible cost reduction after gaining visibility into the current state. You will have a clear roadmap to a contemporary, software-defined, and virtualized infrastructure. This allows your staff to concentrate on more strategic endeavors. Your IT staff will be able to transition from administrators to engineers, working on value-added tasks without the burden of disaster recovery, backups, and administrative tasks.Enhance security: Without complete visibility into your network, including understanding how people, processes, and other technologies interact, it isn’t easy to defend against cyberattacks. A robust network assessment reveals these behaviors and interactions, enabling a proactive and preventative security strategy that protects against global threats and end-user vulnerabilities.Identify significant cost-savings potential: A conventional, legacy computing environment allocates capacity according to estimated peak resource demands. This results in periods where costly resources are idle and other times when power is insufficient. A network evaluation enables the design of a new network architecture incorporating cloud computing. In the cloud, you can access as much or as little capacity as you require and scale dynamically to meet actual demand, paying only for what you consume.Determine protocol improvements such as network segmentation: Assessments can reveal weaknesses in your current operations, thereby revealing opportunities for improvement. For instance, when users access data on a flat network, an enterprise-wide data breach can spread rapidly. Network segmentation reduces the attack surface and can simplify compliance reporting for your organization.Get C-suite support for improvements: With enterprise leaders investing more than ever in technology strategy, a rigorous assessment can convince the C-suite to approve meaningful upgrades. Strengthen your proposal for required enhancements by providing analytic data demonstrating how technical features will directly enhance operations, support business objectives, and alleviate specific pain points.

Elements of a Feasibility Study

A feasibility study collects crucial company data and urges investors, company leaders, and other company personnel to support a project. Consider including the following components of a feasibility study in your own:

1. Title page

The first part of the feasibility study that your reader will see is the title page. You should use a clear title that tells people about your project. On your title page, you should also list the names and job titles of the project leader and each project member. You could tell the reader when the project is supposed to start and when you think it will be done to give them a better idea of your timeline.

2. Table of contents and Executive Summary

The table of contents aims to facilitate the reader’s access to any portion of the report. After completing the information, complete the table of contents to ensure that the page numbers correspond with the section headings. Typically, your word processor includes a table of contents feature that makes creating this component quick and easy. In addition, the executive summary should be the first significant component of your feasibility study. This section should contain an introduction to the project, its objective, the targeted solutions, and a summary of the sources used to establish the report’s credibility.

3. Market feasibility

In the market feasibility section of your report, you tell the reader about the company’s statistics, market research, and plans for the future. Start by describing the business your company is in. Talk about its history, the practices and trends used now, and what you think the future holds for the industry. Then you can narrow your focus to discuss how your business fits into this industry. Write down your top competitors, primary income sources, sales numbers, and any niches you could go after to get more customers. The section on market feasibility helps the reader learn more about your business, what it offers, and how your feasibility project could help it grow.

4. Technical feasibility

The technical feasibility section lists several operational aspects that affect your company’s performance. Talk about the location of your business, the supplies required to make the goods or services you provide, the manufacturing procedure, the facilities used for quality control, and the transportation needed to deliver your items to stores. The technical feasibility part gives your reader a thorough insight into the elements that keep your company operating so you can keep providing top-notch goods and services to your clientele. Furthermore, this component aids in bolstering the integrity of your financial viability section.

5. Financial feasibility

The financial feasibility section describes all facets of your company’s finances. Include information about your investors, current revenue, assets, liabilities, and the prior year’s total yearly revenue in this area. Include a cost-benefit analysis that supports your organization’s requirements. The financial feasibility section aims to persuade readers to invest their support, cash, or both in the proposed project by demonstrating the operational expenses.

6. Organizational feasibility

The organizational feasibility part demonstrates your organization’s legal and ethical policies to the reader. This section should overview your company’s organizational structure, including branch locations and departments. You may wish to include a brief biography of each of your company’s founders or board members. You can also profit from emphasizing the HR procedures your company does to preserve ethical and legal responsibilities for its employees and the motivational techniques you implement to increase workplace efficiency. The organizational feasibility section assists the reader in determining if your organization’s current practices complement or support the planned endeavor.

7. Conclusion

Before your appendix and reference pages, the conclusion is the last part of your report that you write. Each of the previous sections is summed up in this section. At the end of the finale, you should bring up one or more suggestions to get people to take action on the topic. If you need to explain these suggestions in more than a few sentences, you can put them in a separate section.

How to Evaluate Your Network

Regularly evaluating your network should be a component of your small business‘s annual planning approach. Your network is the secret backbone of your organization, yet it is easy to overlook it when focusing on your front-line business services. If it fails, the entire organization is at risk. You need a network evaluation system, but where should you begin?

1. Network Evaluation Criteria

Before you come up with criteria for evaluating your network, you need a way to write down and keep track of your findings. You can only do a good evaluation if you have a plan of how your network works now. Documentation should include information about the protocol, a list of the equipment used, and any diagrams needed to understand how the systems work together. A summary of each evaluation should also be part of the documentation. This is a checklist that will save you time when you re-evaluate things. It should also say when each reviewed item was bought, so you can replace systems before they break down or stop working altogether. Consistently documenting things will also help you find patterns or common areas of weakness. For example, do a few evaluations and see that most of your security problems come from spam email. In that case, that’s a clear sign that you need to put more resources into securing your email, with two-factor authentication and more training for your team.

2. Security

Numerous network security components need to be reviewed. Antivirus and antispam are frequent topics on our blog, and with good reason! You must be aware of the vulnerabilities on your network to address them before cybercriminals can exploit any network flaws. Your firewall regularly monitors incoming and outgoing traffic, but you should rely on something other than firewall alerts to keep you informed. Someone on your staff should monitor your data traffic reports and keep you apprised of their contents. When evaluating the network, the firewall, antivirus, and anti-malware solutions must be reviewed and, if necessary, upgraded. Because computers on a shared network are configured to trust one another, a single computer with inadequate security can bring down the entire network. Ensure that you utilize separate guest networks from your business network. Review access control so you know precisely which network resources each user can access. Check application security for exploitable vulnerabilities or holes. Utilize a behavior analytics tool to evaluate abnormal network activity.

3. Performance Analysis

Whether your small business has a wired, wireless, or hybrid network, performance evaluation should include a significant portion of your review. Perform tests on the hardware and speeds of your network. Frequently, these tests will identify areas where your system might or should operate more efficiently. Keep track of the age of your network’s computers, servers, printers, and other components. Items older than six years may drive up to ten times more slowly than younger ones. And even if your small business utilizes cloud-based resources, it might be badly impacted by network performance that falls below peak levels. Maintaining optimal network performance guarantees that your workers can work quickly and efficiently.

4. Address Tech Needs

Wait to file the network evaluation report until the subsequent evaluation is conducted. Scrutinize it with the right personnel and address any needs that it reveals. Do you require additional security measures besides your standard firewall, antivirus, and malware updates? Consider installing or updating a data security system and acquiring an intrusion prevention system. Address personnel issues, such as modifying network user access control and updating security standards. A network review is only as effective as your effort to address the identified faults.

FAQs

What does a feasibility study include?

A feasibility study is a preliminary investigation into the benefits and viability of a proposed enterprise or endeavor. A feasibility study aims to give an impartial analysis of all aspects of a proposed project, including technical, economic, financial, legal, and environmental factors.

What is a feasibility example?

For instance, a prototype automobile is a tool for the feasibility study, an experiment on rats to develop a new medicine is a method of feasibility analysis, and comparing a laptop’s configuration and features before purchase resembles feasibility tests.

What is a feasibility plan?

The feasibility plan focuses on the core of your product or service, whereas the entire business plan builds on this analysis and elaborates on how you will execute the business. A feasibility plan defines the product/service and outlines the project’s operations for stakeholders.

Any communications service provider must do feasibility studies to assess whether a network installation will be successful. This should be the initial step when beginning a new project. It should be written before development ever begins. It is the most crucial determinant of whether a project can and should proceed.