Mr. Smith is the Director of IT at a law firm located in downtown Chicago. He ne

Question

Mr. Smith is the Director of IT at a law firm located in downtown Chicago. He needs to plan for a network upgrade. He has decided that he would like to have a network analysis done before the upgrade so that he can find out which systems would require upgrades and to create a strategy to present to the senior partners that will include return on investment.

The law offices occupy four floors of a high-rise building. The customer is experiencing network latency, especially in the Accounting department and in Human Resources, which both reside on the 32nd floor. The director of the Accounting department has expressed concerns about the security of his files. The Research, IT, and Corporate Administration departments all share the 33rd floor. The senior and junior partners and their support staff occupy the 35th floor, and the 36th floor is used for reception and conference rooms. The firm has decided that video conferencing is an essential component of its business and is looking to implement video conferencing as soon as possible so it can communicate with two new satellite offices that will be occupied in six months.

The firm has one network segment for each floor, but has been experiencing latency. Each floor except the 36th has 10 to 20 printers. Each floor has a 100Mb uplink to the Data Center on the 33rd floor. There are approximately 50 PCs on the 36th floor, 150 PCs on the 35th floor, and 40 PCs on both the 32nd and 33rd floors. The servers for each department reside on their respective floors. Mr. Smith is concerned about network security and wants a recommendation to secure traffic of three specific departments: Human Resources, Accounting, and Corporate Administration.

Answer these questions:

What type of testing program (Prototype or Pilot) would you recommend to test the video conferencing among the remote offices? Justify your choice of one testing program over the other.

What type of naming structure would you give to servers, network devices and end nodes in this network? Provide a few examples.

Explain why Mr. Smith's existing network does not provide adequate security for the data in each department. How do you want to optimize the network?

Explain to Mr. Smith the function of each network device.

Will the needs of key departments change your network design? Explain your answer.

Write a 3 - 5 page paper using the APA style that summarizes your findings, and provides enough detail to fully support your opinion.

Explanation / Answer

A. What type of testing program (Prototype or Pilot) would you recommend to test the video conferencing among the remote offices?

We would recommend to go for "Pilot Testing" to test the video conferencing among remote offices because, a Pilot is intended to be production quality - albeit on a smaller scale. Hence we need to perform the video conferencing testing as though its a real time production situation but on a smaller scale of implementation. Also pilot testing is ultimately useful in getting real user feedback, and by this real time feedback we can detect the improvement areas, the barriers in video conferencing setups, network issues to be worked upon and ultimately the clients experience how they feel. We can also perform Pilot Testing with a small group of clients to see what outcome we get in order to decide the next steps of improvement. Hence Pilot Testing would be an ideal decision.

B. What type of naming structure would you give to servers, network devices and end nodes in this network? Provide a few examples.

The Naming structure will include as:-

CH-XXXF-YYR-[PC|PR]ZZZ

So here, CH=Chicago, if there are offices located globally in Mexico(ME), Indian(IN), etc, represent it with first two characters.

Next XXXF = The Floor No suffixed by F which helps us to identify that it denotes the corresponding Floor.

eg:- 032F(32th Floor), 033F(33rd Floor), 023F(23rd Floor)

Next YYR = The Room No suffixed by R which helps us to identify that it denotes the corresponding Room.

eg:- 11R(11th Room), 07(7th Room)

Next [PC|PR]ZZZ = PC means Personal Computer and PR = Printer and ZZZ means that PC/PR number

eg:- PC123(Personal Computer numbered 123), PR007(Printer numbered 7)

Few Examples are:-

CH-032F-01R-PC010 - In Chicago Office, on 32nd Floor, in Room no 01, we can find Personal Computer labeled 10

CH-023F-11R-PR020 - In Chicago Office, on 23rd Floor, in Room no 11, we can find Printer labeled 20

C. Explain why Mr. Smith's existing network does not provide adequate security for the data in each department.

Mr. Smith's servers for each department are located locally on each floor. So if any floor's security is compromised the data security too gets compromised and there are chances of data breaches to happen. Moreover, each floor has a 100Mb uplink to the Data Center on the 33rd floor, and if any floor network gets crashed or if network becomes slow then that floor will experience in Data access issues and if somebody breaches the firewall in either of the floor, it will be very difficult to find out as to which floor the server got hacked as all the floors have their own servers setup.

D. How do you want to optimize the network?

1. Have a centralized Server at a particular floor (most probably First Floor will be ideal) and have connections arising from it, instead of having servers in all floors. This way we can minimize connection cost and all floors will enjoy the same connection speed and it will be easy to monitor the server as if a floor faces server issue, means there is a problem in central server itself.

2. Have a Network Administrator who should be the only person having access to the Server Room which contains critical data about "Human Resources, Accounting, and Corporate Administration" departments. Others should only have access to their PC and printers for taking required/important printouts.

3. Have wireless high-speed routers in Video-Conference Rooms because the clients will require high internet connections during Video Chats/Video Conferencing with others and lack of speed might disrupt their meetings.

4. Have a special Computer on each Floor that connects to the Data-Center as we wouldnt have every PC to connect to Data Centers individually. This way the Data Center will have high access speed since nobody can access it unless urgent and we can utilize the 100Mbps link that connects the only system with the Data Center directly.

Please let me know in case of any clarifications required. Thanks!

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