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| Information Management |
Your network plan should help you manage the information gathered, stored, and shared between your users. If you were given an empty three-drawer filing cabinet and told to use it to organize your company’s information, you would have an excellent (although manual) example of a filing system that needs a plan.
Having an overall guide that tells you who will be allowed access to the three drawers will help determine what you store in each one. Once you have that part of the plan, you could put the least-used information in the bottom drawer, the more-used in the middle drawer, and the most used in the top drawer so that it is easier for your users to access their information. Knowing who needs to know what, and its corollary who does not need to know what lets you determine whether to lock a particular drawer, too.
Even when we discuss implementing a three drawer manual filing system, the importance of having a network plan ahead of time becomes evident. If you put the limited access material in a drawer open to all employees, how do you keep it secure? Additional security measures (like adding a lock to a drawer, or moving the secure information somewhere else) may be required later.
A networking plan could tell you that as specific types of sensitive data (like medical, personal, or payroll information) are gathered or grouped, they should be stored higher in the hierarchical structure (ranked from most sensitive to least sensitive), and this can save you time in the end. That plan should specify that the access requirements are stricter for sensitive data and reduce the number of people able to use specific types of information.
The distribution side of the networking plan, as opposed to the accumulation side of the plan discussed above, should spell out that the more an individual has access to the data in storage, the less they should be able to share groups of information entrusted to them. For example, you may not mind sharing your first name, but you would probably object to an instructor openly distributing all information in your school records to anyone requesting it.
