The Challenge: Complexity Happens
Without a structured process, information Technology is complex. Thousands of vendors with multiple products are constantly competing for your budget. The SMB market must stay focused on the business at hand and rarely has time to sort through the competitive noise to determine the best solution for their business needs. Without a structured process for evaluating and selecting solutions, SMB businesses run the risk of making long-term commitments that fail to satisfy expectations— eventually IT becomes the inhibitor rather than the enabler for business success.

The Solution
Network Architects developed the Seven Sacred Abilities to address this exact problem. Drawing upon over 20 years of experience with IT products, projects and operations—we’ve built a structured, analytical process that presents findings in plain English instead of technical jargon. This Seven Sacred Abilities is our proprietary process to ensure that you don’t just get the best technology, but rather the technology that works best for you.

The Methodology
Seven Sacred Abilities starts by analyzing the business needs and confirming the objectives—evaluating solutions that fit within your environment—then building an actionable plan to deploy the solution:

Seven Sacred Abilitiesconsiders the following key criteria in evaluating IT solutions:

• Affordability — Assess the initial capital and on-going operational expenses
  to build a business value justification for the investment
• Availability: Deals with system uptime and fault transparency requirements
• Capability— Considers the product architecture, features, benefits and
  compliance standards
• Flexibility— Takes into account the solution’s ease of evolution, integration
  and extensibility
• Manageability— Evaluates the overall technical operations capabilities
  provided by the product
• Scalability— Evaluates the product’s ability to grow the transaction volume,
  concurrent users, throughput, data size, and ability for stepwise upgrades
  instead of large-scale investments
• Vulnerability— Considers the overall security infrastructure and its fit within
  a multi-layer, integrated defense system