Available resources for ongoing maintenance

As touched on in the budget section, there must be resources dedicated to ongoing network maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting. These resources include administrator hours to configure and maintain the network, training for the administrator if needed, extra hardware and software as needed, and possible extra staff to help the administrator in emergencies. Without these resources, you will quickly find the network reverting to static routing out of necessity. This is because:

• Routing software updates will require time.
• Routing hardware updates will require time.
• Office reorganizations or significant personnel movement will require time from a networking point of view.
• Networking problems that occur, such as failed hardware, require time to locate and fix the problem.

If the resources to accomplish these tasks are not budgeted, they will either not happen or not happen at the required level to continue operation. This will result in both the network administration staff and the network users being very frustrated.

A lack of maintenance budget will also result in increasingly heavy reliance on static routing as the network administrators are forced to use quick fixes for problems that come up. This invariably involves going to static routing, and dropping the more complex and time-consuming dynamic routing.