Case Study

The IT director for headquarters of a small trading agency called TRA that provides software and information systems and underwriters and brokers has been experiencing rapid growth. At present, the agency has a small office with a LAN proved by telecommunication service provider. The IT directors aims to increase the LAN to a medium-sized infrastructure. Also, the company wants to consider newer options such as cloud computing from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. You are hired to evaluate the current infrastructure and make recommendations to grow the environment quickly with as little disruption as possible.

The IT director expect you to consider how the new LAN should be segmented to support and isolate the departments of the company. Because the agency is a trading provider, they are subject to strict regulations regarding access to sensitive data. Moreover, direct access to the Internet must be segmented off in its own subnet to form a DMZ.

The IT department consists of 24 technical resources.

Each department's applications are hosted on a single server in a rack. All of the servers connected to a switch, which connects to the router and then the Internet. There is a single development server connected to a switch as well. There is a second rack of servers that act as a standby failover system for failover. The agency has 500 employees and plans to grow to over 800 in the next year. Consider who will need to access the network and when. Consider issues such as bandwidth, time of day (you may infer this from the departments). Currently, the network is a star topology and is extensible.

The company is on a single floor of a large building, and the single switch is used as an aggregator for all communications and connections. The switch is carried out to the Internet by the internet service provider.

You may have ascertained that everyone must be on the same network/subnet and that would be correct. The IT director wants to maintain a small data centre footprint and manage its own network including the current floor and the one below. Other people, mostly IT will move to the bottom floor as new employees are hired. The IT director is okay with staying with the current internet service provider but wants a new LAN design.

You must evaluate the environment and make recommendations. Some departments might need to be subdivided into separate subnets based on their status as internal or public facing.

Provide your technical recommendations for:

1. Going forward what network topologies and architecture should be used, should you use NAT and where? Provide a Diagram. You can attach your file.
2. How should networks be segregated for security? Justify your reasoning.
3. What network address and subnet masks will you use for each subnet (use IPv4 and CIDR blocks).
4. How will you manage access to the networks? Justify your choice.