The selection of networking services is an essential decision when it comes to creating a networking services infrastructure. Equally important is the integration of those services. Your final design must produce a network that is manageable and clearly identifies the criteria for ensuring that the network's security, availability, and performance are maintained.
For example, you want to be sure that the networking services you decide to implement will work with your network application environment. You may want to implement Proxy Server 2.0, but your applications are not WinSock^[1] compliant and cannot use the SOCKS^[2] or Web Proxy service. In this case, you will need to reconsider your application or network services environment to assure seamless integration of your network solutions.

The objective of your management strategy is to ensure that the criteria specified in your networking services design are reflected in the actual network. The following are the major categories to include in your management design:

1. Collecting data
2. Analyzing data
3. Responding to service variations

1. DHCP: The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol is a series of network protocols and services that allow for automatic assignment of IP addressing information to TCP/IP network clients configured as DHCP Client computers.
2. DNS: An hierarchical name service for TCP/IP hosts. DNS allows users to connect to network resources via friendly host names, rather than having to remember IP addresses for network servers.

When you create your networking services design, remember that your design is the platform for the connectivity and protocol requirements of the organization. You include multiple networking services into your design in order to do the following:

1. Establish a network foundation
2. Provide access to public networks
3. Include connectivity for remote users and locations
4. Support network-based applications and authentication methods

In the next lesson, I will discuss how organizational goals map to specific aspects of a design.

[1] WinSock: The Windows Sockets Session Layer interface. Applications written for the WinSock interface use DNS hosts names for resource name resolution.

[2] SOCKS: The Sockets session layer interface. Microsoft Proxy Server 2.0 provides a SOCKS proxy for non-Microsoft clients to access Internet resources via the Proxy Server.