You have been hired as consultants to design and implement a widespread security initiative for a rapidly expanding global eCommerce corporation with two websites and locations in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, Paris and Johannesburg. Business is good! In the next three months, the corporation will be acquiring another company in a different line of business with plans to offer products for sale online.

Part of your role is to recommend the best way for integrating both environments. However, not much information is available about the IT setup for the company being acquired. The other company might even have a mix of different operating environment it is unclear since the IT staff in that company is not very communicative.

Some critical staff members in the other company are not happy with the upcoming merger and have sworn to be as uncooperative as possible. In particular, the Network Manager for the other company is a difficult personality plans have been afoot to fire him but unfortunately he is the only one who knows the network architecture completely and he is not willing to share. You must find out everything about the new environment and propose specifics on how to seamlessly integrate both environments

In the initial conversation with executives of the global company, you realize that the company does not have a security policy. After much discussion, they have agreed that you should come up with a detailed security policy customized for the company.

In a follow-up meeting with the executives and IT staff of the global corporation, you are also assigned the task of identifying two (2) security audit tools (vulnerability/web scanners), two (2) intrusion detection systems and two (2) network firewall products that would be suitable for the global company. You are to test and describe the features of selected security solutions, indicating (a) which you prefer and (b) providing convincing rationale for why you prefer a specific solution in each category. In other words, you are to evaluate two products for each category and recommend one, giving the reasons for your choice.

Salient points: The new corporate acquisition will increase the total number of computers under you IT departments care to about 60,000 computers and network devices. The exact number is not clear: even the management at the other company is not sure of the number of systems in that network because of the difficulty in finding out the specifics about the company being acquired.

From the little information that has been gleaned from the other company, it appears to run a mixture of a peer-to-peer network and the domain model. Part of the decision you would have to make would be how the integrated environments would be networked: you have been given the discretion to come up with the design and budget (subject to approval, of course) for the overall security initiative, covering (1) the security policy, (2) network audit to determine what devices and data are being protected, (3) seamless integration between the merging companies, (4) recommendation for IDS system(s), (5) recommendations for security audit tools (web/vulnerability scanners) and (6) recommendation for network firewall device(s).