The mission critical nature of today’s networks, rapid changes in technology, and increased complexity of Internet/Intranet related 3-tiered architectures are causing businesses to pay ever-closer attention to capacity planning.

The goal of Pate’s capacity planning practice is to project the network and system resource requirements that will be needed to support business needs. Typically, this is achieved by determining the relationship between business applications and the network resources consumed by these applications.

The first step in this process is to determine what applications will be running on the network, their architectures and traffic patterns, and how much traffic will be generated by each application’s functions. The resulting information is then tied to expected business volumes to compute the network capacity that will be needed to efficiently support business needs.

Pate Consultants Group maintains a vendor neutral stance and independence. We assist clients in an objective manner, in developing product specifications, analyzing product features and functionality, conducting performance evaluations and completing all of the related documentation.

Technology and product evaluation is a critical phase in the life cycle of network planning. This is the phase of the project when a defined architecture and a financial model are used to make decisions in the marketplace. The choice of technology deployed will, by necessity, narrow product alternatives. These decisions are critical to the deployment of a network platform that will successfully support delivery of low cost and high quality production services.

As corporations and their technology suppliers have moved to more open systems, technology choices and the number of available products have greatly increased. It is common, in today’s IT environment, to be able to select several different technologies that will not interfere with the deployment of specific applications or systems.

Pate’s objective is to evaluate various choices and to assist our clients in narrowing the final selection to a suite of technologies that: a) can be leveraged across all of the client’s existing / planned systems and b) will develop broad market acceptance, thus ensuring long term efficiencies. Although the chosen set of technologies is the foundation of an infrastructure, the deployed product set has a very direct impact on operational functionality, network scalability and life cycle costs.

Pate also works with its client to solve a variety of miscellaneous and unexpected network problems. Some of the problem areas include: physical plant problems, multi-vendor integration issues, routing problems, security, and connectivity problems.

As the demand for internetwork connectivity grows, so does the need for controlling access to proprietary information. Computer and network security breaches can cost your corporation millions of dollars and untold loss of prestige. Pate Consultants has extensive experience in providing network security solutions for a wide range of organizations. This allows us to deal with a wide range of security issues, including:

	Assessment / General Consultation
	Vulnerability and Risk Analysis
	Policy Development
	Use of Firewalls
	Deployment of Cryptographic Mechanisms and Certificate / Key Management
	Security Systems Design and Implementation

In other words, we work with our clients to identify security objectives, review network architectures, and develop / implement security programs that meet organizational goals and conform to the latest industry standards.