The creation of local networks allows you to optimize the company's business processes, speed up work, and secure confidential data. Ensuring a continuous and quick exchange of data between all employees contributes to better performance of work. With the help of corporate networks, it is easier to carry out complex management of enterprise activities, and they also increase the flexibility of setting access rights.

Learn more about how to set corporate networks.

Consider the specifics of your business
First of all, it is necessary to develop technical documentation for the project for the implementation of local area networks. At the initial stage, it is better to use IT consulting so that a specialized company can take into account the peculiarities and real needs of your company. Without experience, it is easy to choose the wrong software or hardware, so you should not risk your finances and time.

It is also worth thinking about network design. During this process, you should decide which devices will need to be used, how many modules will be required, and what functions they should perform. You should do this based on the size of the company because for building a corporate network of small businesses, more accessible and less complex modeling languages ​​are used. However, corporate networks are suitable for almost any company, from small property accountant firms to large enterprises. 

Ditch proprietary solutions
Proprietary software is software that is owned by its developer or other copyright holders. It doesn’t conform to the principles of free and semi-free software. However, the copyright owner has the exclusive right to modify, copy, distribute, and use this software. It is important to understand that commercial software can be free software, but proprietary software should not be confused with it.

Each manufacturer of active network equipment offers its own proprietary solutions to simplify network administration configuration, build highly reliable, and fault-tolerant systems. And these solutions can be quite effective and useful. But proprietary solutions also have drawbacks:
- Dependence on a specific manufacturer. If you need to replace equipment or scale the network, it isn’t so easy to switch to another
- Increasing and narrowing the requirements for personnel. The engineer must know the specific solutions of a particular manufacturer
- Complex troubleshooting process. This increases the need for a contract with the technical support of the manufacturer.

It is better to build a vendor-independent fault-tolerant network, for this it is necessary to minimize the use of proprietary protocols and give preference to open standards.

Build a fault-tolerant network
A fault-tolerant network is one that provides the least impact of outages to the fewest devices. It is built to recover quickly when a failure occurs. These networks use multiple paths to transfer data from one source to another. If one path is not available, messages can be sent immediately over the other. Having multiple paths is called a reservation.

One way to provide redundancy in reliable networks is to implement packet-switched networks. Packet switching divides traffic into packets that are routed over a public network. A single message such as an email or video stream is divided into multiple blocks of data called packets. Each packet contains information about the source address and destination of the message. 

Routers on the network switch packets based on the current state of the network. This means that data packets of one message can travel to their destination in different ways. At the same time, the dynamic change of the route in case of unavailability of the communication channel doesn’t affect the user.

There are three basic principles to keep in mind when building a fault-tolerant network:
- link reservation (each logical link between active network equipment must consist of at least two physical links)
- equipment redundancy (each kernel and distribution LUN must consist of two physical devices)
- competent setup of equipment (two server rooms will be required to build geographically distributed LAN components and minimize the impact of an accident in one of the server rooms on the operation of the entire network)

Don't forget to reserve critical nodes
Redundancy of critical nodes usually means:
- redundancy of power supplies - installation of 2 units duplicating each other
- redundancy of control boards - to a greater extent refers to modular switches, which provide for the connection of several boards duplicating each other
- redundancy of interface cards - also applies for the most part to modular switches

It is also worth considering reserving links and connections. To do this, it is necessary to provide duplicating cable routes or radio links, in the case of open spaces. At the same time, there should be a competent location of routes along different cable shafts and channels inside the building, as well as a geographical distribution over the territory at the level of two or more buildings, city, region, or country.

When building backup communication links, it is necessary to follow a number of equipment recommendations:
- in case of duplication of interface cards of a modular switch, it is necessary to distribute links between units - interface cards 
- it is recommended to use communication aggregation protocols (LACP, MLT, PAgP, etc.) to combine links into groups and balance the load between them
- use routers that support ECMP (Equal-Cost-Multi-Path) protocols

Contact the specialists
Corporate networks make it easier for employees of any company to work together because they provide access to the simultaneous editing of files and documents, and also significantly speed up the exchange of data. 

But it is unlikely that it will be possible to create an IT infrastructure on your own that will really benefit and will be as effective as possible. It isn’t enough just to buy equipment and hope that it will solve all the problems - an integrated approach is needed here.

To create a corporate network, the best option would be complex development and configuration from a reliable IT company, since you will immediately receive the entire range of services and save on costs. If the business has gone digital, then its own network will reduce the risk of disruptions, late receipt of information by employees, and slowdowns. Business continuity eliminates financial losses and increases customer confidence.