Networking & Devices

Cloud migration did not remove the network from the risk register; it moved the failure points. When email, files, line-of-business applications and voice all traverse the same internet connection, the site link stops being plumbing and becomes the single dependency the business runs on. The articles in this topic cover that layer honestly, including the parts that are unglamorous and cheap to get right.

On the network side, the material covers router and firewall management, switching and VLAN design for sites that have grown organically, wireless controller and access point deployment where coverage matters more than raw throughput, failover and secondary links, and the monitoring that tells you a link degraded before staff start calling. Multi-site organisations, remote mining and construction sites, and venues with public and staff traffic on the same hardware all get specific treatment.

On the device side, the focus is Microsoft Intune as the management plane for Windows, plus what changes when Apple hardware is in the fleet. Enrolment, compliance policy, application deployment, update rings, encryption and remote wipe are covered as a set rather than individually, because compliance policy only means something when conditional access enforces it. Bring-your-own-device arrangements get a frank treatment of what you can and cannot enforce on a personal phone.

Lifecycle is the recurring theme. Hardware bought in a single capital round ages out in a single wave; staggering refresh, standardising models and holding a small spares pool prevents the scramble. Where devices connect to operational technology or to site systems that cannot be patched on a normal cycle, we cover segmentation as the practical control rather than pretending a modern baseline can be applied everywhere.