These days, networks are larger and more complex than ever. It’s all too easy to fall short when managing performance, security, and compliance. That’s where network assessments and network audits can help.
Both network assessments and network audits can give you a more comprehensive understanding of your network and its current strengths, weaknesses, and threats. As a result, you can quickly identify and resolve issues. Plus, it’s easier to proactively act and address performance bottlenecks and security threats before they impact operations.
In this guide, we’ll answer questions such as “What is a network assessment?” and “What is a network audit?” and learn the differences between the two. We’ll also discuss the benefits of network assessments, how to prepare for them, a checklist of what to do during them, and review some network assessment tools.
Network Assessment and Network Audit Differences
Preparing for a Network Assessment
How Can Network Assessment Tools Help Secure Networks?
Recommended Network Assessment and Network Audit Tools.
1. SolarWinds Observability (Free Trial)
2. ManageEngine Network Configuration Manager
What Is a Network Assessment?
Network assessment involves evaluating your current IT infrastructure. Not only does this mean thinking about network management and security, but it also requires you to consider network performance and general processes to gain a more comprehensive view of your network.
If you are experiencing a lack of networking visibility, have noticed a decline in your network performance, or need to cut costs, a network assessment can help. You might also perform a network security assessment when onboarding a new client, adding new services, migrating data to cloud-based systems, or implementing other major network changes.
Often, organizations conduct network assessments reactively, meaning they only examine their network and infrastructure attentively after something has gone wrong, and they need to discover the root cause of a problem. However, taking a more proactive approach to network vulnerability assessment is best. By regularly examining your network, you can gain a better understanding of your IT infrastructure and its health, enabling you to pinpoint areas for improvement and take targeted action.
As part of a network assessment, you should check all routers, monitors, switches, and devices, take network inventory, and review device configurations. It’s also essential to examine your devices’ performance, security policies, and management processes. Look for any vulnerabilities or misconfigurations that could introduce security risks to your network and think about current capacity and how you might support future network growth without impacting performance. Additionally, review traffic flow patterns and resource utilization across your network.
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What Is a Network Audit?
A network audit is the systematic process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data on your network. This involves looking at availability, security, and performance to determine your network’s overall health and understand how it compares to industry and governmental compliance regulations.
By performing regular network audits, you can grasp how your network control and management practices are panning out. You will be able to pinpoint areas where your network is falling short of compliance policies and regulations. As a result, you can make informed decisions to rectify any issues on your network. Network audits can also shed light on threats and vulnerabilities.
Network auditing is a comprehensive process with many steps. As part of your network audits, review your procedure management system, security patches for software on your network, training logs, penetration testing, bring-your-own-device policy, bandwidth demands, and wireless network security. It’s also a good idea to identify firewall holes, test software, encrypt laptop hard disks, review users and their access levels, search for unauthorized access points, and ensure sensitive data on your network is stored in a separate and secure location. Finally, compile a detailed report and send it to the appropriate personnel within your organization. This will enable your organization to make informed decisions as you plan network upgrades, fix faults and vulnerabilities, and improve overall performance.
By engaging in regular and thorough network auditing, you can reduce vulnerabilities across your network, increase security, identify and resolve network inefficiencies, meet compliance requirements, and resolve issues proactively, saving everyone time and energy.
Network Assessment and Network Audit Differences
While both network assessments and network audits focus on evaluating an organization’s IT infrastructure, they aren’t the same. While network assessments generally involve a broader network evaluation to provide insights into performance, security, and efficiency, network audits are more detailed and structured. They can help an organization remain compliant with security policies, regulatory requirements, and industry best practices.
Organizations usually proactively conduct network assessments to help maintain their network’s health. On the other hand, network audits are often used to verify compliance or troubleshoot specific issues.
Network Assessment Benefits
Network assessments offer several benefits. They can help you:
- Identify underutilized and overused resources: It’s easy to overuse or underuse resources across your network if you aren’t paying attention. A network assessment can help uncover and fix imbalances in resource allocation, helping you reduce waste and improve efficiency.
- Uncover security issues: A network assessment can also help find vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and outdated security practices across your network. You can then take action to patch vulnerabilities and strengthen your defenses.
- Monitor device performance: Keeping an eye on all devices can be tricky, if not impossible; organizations have anywhere from tens to thousands of devices on their networks at any moment. With network assessment software, you can automatically discover devices on a network and view valuable device data.
- Pinpoint bandwidth bottlenecks: Large file downloads, video streaming, and intensive programs can consume much bandwidth, causing bottlenecks that impact the rest of your network. Manually discovering which applications, programs, and software solutions are at the root of bandwidth bottlenecks is a time-consuming process that involves individually examining each network component and traffic flow. A network assessment can help quickly identify bottlenecks, enabling you to increase network speed and functionality.
- Establish a baseline and create thresholds: A network assessment establishes a baseline you can use to evaluate future network performance. This can help track trends over time, identify anomalies, and detect potential issues before they become critical problems. By understanding your normal network traffic patterns, resource usage, and performance metrics, you can set realistic thresholds that trigger alerts when deviations occur.
- Cut costs: Network assessments can help identify unnecessary expenses by revealing underutilized resources, redundant services, and inefficiencies in your network infrastructure. By analyzing your organization’s usage patterns, you can determine whether you’re overpaying for bandwidth, maintaining outdated hardware, or running unnecessary applications and adjust accordingly to keep costs down.
Preparing for a Network Assessment
To prepare an organization for network assessment, you should enable Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) on your network devices. If SNMP is not enabled, your network assessment tools may not be able to collect essential performance and status data from your devices. Make sure to define your SNMP community strings (v1 and v2c) or password (v3) on your devices. Ensure credentials and permissions are correctly configured.
You should also check that the computer you plan on using to conduct the network security assessment is configured to access devices connected to the network. If it is currently restricted from accessing devices, you must change your access rules before starting the network assessment.
Network Assessment Checklist
During a network assessment, you will want to complete this network assessment checklist:
- Review your bring-your-own-device policy: If your organization has a bring-your-own-device policy, make sure to set clear boundaries and communicate them to staff. Employees’ personal devices can place additional demands on bandwidth, leading to slower speeds and higher security risks since these devices are exposed to insecure networks and have unapproved third-party applications installed.
- Consider bandwidth demands: It’s also important to assess how your bandwidth is used and distributed. This will allow you to pinpoint individual devices or applications that are hogging bandwidth or determine when it’s time to increase available bandwidth. It can also provide insights into bandwidth usage to help prioritize applications and improve performance.
- Look at cybersecurity vulnerabilities: Cybersecurity threats are constantly evolving, so you need to stay on top of vulnerabilities across your network. Examine firewall configurations, access controls, encryption protocols, and endpoint security measures. You should look for outdated software, unpatched systems, and weak passwords.
- Examine network infrastructure: Look at your system’s hardware and software components, including switches, load balancers, routers, firewalls, cables, applications, firewalls, and access points. Ensure all components are up to date and functioning optimally, and review current configurations.
- Think about potential network upgrades: After completing your network assessment, use the information to make decisions regarding necessary upgrades and improvements.
How Can Network Assessment Tools Help Secure Networks?
Network assessment tools can make a major difference in securing your network. With the help of reliable network assessment software, your organization can:
- Identify security vulnerabilities: With network assessment software, you can perform a network vulnerability assessment to uncover weaknesses in your infrastructure, such as outdated firmware and unpatched systems.
- Perform vulnerability scanning: Some network assessment tools can automatically scan your network for known vulnerabilities.
- Monitor network traffic: Network assessment tools can also help continuously track traffic, enabling you to quickly identify abnormalities, unauthorized access, and other threats.
- Improve incident response: By allowing your team to rapidly pinpoint security breaches or anomalies, network assessment tools can help you respond to issues and minimize or completely mitigate downtime.
- Meet compliance requirements with relative ease: Network assessment software helps ensure compliance with industry standards and regulatory requirements by generating detailed reports and actionable insights, making it easier to demonstrate adherence to critical policies.
Recommended Network Assessment and Network Audit Tools
The right network assessment and network audit tools can make a significant difference. To help you get started, here are three of our favorite network assessment software options.
1. SolarWinds Observability (Free Trial)
SolarWinds® Observability is an excellent network monitoring tool with network assessment and network audit capabilities. Offered as SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted and SolarWinds Observability SaaS, the solution was created to thrive within varied environments. It can help your organization gain deep insights into your entire IT infrastructure, including networks, servers, applications, and databases.
© 2025 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.
You will be able to access advanced analytics, better predict resource capacity, correlate events, automate troubleshooting, and accelerate issue resolution, all while reducing alert fatigue and eliminating tool sprawl. With the help of SolarWinds Observability solutions, you can better visualize your network, eliminate operational silos, protect data, and improve database, application, and network performance.
2. ManageEngine Network Configuration Manager
ManageEngine Network Configuration Manager is a network configuration and change management (NCCM) solution designed to help you gain visibility and control over switches, routers, firewalls, and other devices on your network. With ManageEngine Network Configuration Manager, you can monitor configuration changes, receive notifications of changes, schedule device configuration backups, and track user activities. ManageEngine Network Configuration Manager can check device configurations for compliance violations, automate configuration tasks, and scan devices for firmware vulnerabilities.
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3. Auvik
With Auvik, you can gain visibility into and control over your network. It can automatically discover your network and create an easy-to-understand network map in minutes, giving you the real-time status of your sites, networks, and devices. Auvik can connect to over 15,000 types of devices from over 700 vendors, is equipped with over 64 out-of-the-box alerts, and offers a pay-per-device pricing model.