The world of work has changed - The pandemic has accelerated the style of the workforce to be more in tune with modern living with more and more organisations creating ‘return to the office’ policies which reflect a blend of work from home and the office.

This new operational challenge has yet to be refined and, all too often, workers find themselves in the office talking to immediate colleagues at home and so negating any benefit of face-to-face working.

I'm not sure if you all know about the existence of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) - they are the 'user friendly' wing of GCHQ and publish lots of good articles about cyber security. I had the pleasure of working with their support on a piece of "Critical National Infrastructure" some years back and found their ideas practical and helpful - although TBH it was the first and only time I've had meetings with an engineer who had their own minder, who sat alongside, didn't say anything and just took lots of notes!

Anyway, I recently came across a very interesting article from them and I wanted an excuse to reference it here and discuss some of the issues they raise.

Your networks underpin the operation of all your IT and networks are often assumed to "just work".

Nevertheless, they may contain a considerable amount of sub-optimal configuration, faulty operation due to bugs and sometimes areas of poor design. It may have had a large number of changes or upgrades that in the short term improve functionality, but in the long term make operation more prone to failure.

You have arrived at an excellent network design that will give you the performance and capacity you need. How can you ensure it will be truly fit for purpose and manageable into the future?

When developing a reliable network, or making design changes, there are some important additional measures that will improve your network manageability and hence reduce costs.