Designing a Network for a Small Business

Answer

Designing a Network for a Small Business

The Equipment to Be Used

The official definition of a small business in the United States is given by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), but generally, a small business is that with small number of employees, normally less than 500 (Longenecker, Petty, Palich & Hoy, 2013). The business in question has only about 50 employees and therefore it qualifies to be called a small business. Small office computing, unlike the enterprise networks require modest computing and networking equipment. Networking in this office will only need a dozen or a slightly more computers and just a couple of laser printers. This network must make it possible for the organization members to share information, in addition to the printers and the other peripherals (Colombo, Laursen, Magnusson & Rossi‐Lamastra, 2012). Just a single local area network (LAN) made up of two servers that make use of off-the-shelf components will be able to meet all the needs of this organization. Security matters must also of course be taken into consideration and the designer must ensure that this network is both functional and secure from the various security threats (Colombo, Laursen, Magnusson & Rossi‐Lamastra, 2012). Just a single person with moderate technical knowhow and expertise will successfully manage this network.

Strategies on How to Connect the Two Differing Office Space Floors

Designing a network for the offices of this business would be a bit easier given that all the offices are located within a single building. The greatest challenge, however, is that the offices are located in different floors with a different office in between the floors making them to be non-adjacent. This challenge can be solved by designing a way of connecting the offices that are located far apart, as is the case. The best way to do this is to adopt the virtual local area network (virtual LAN/VLAN), which is a logical grouping of the network nodes (Colombo, Laursen, Magnusson & Rossi‐Lamastra, 2012). A VLAN enables geographically detached network nodes to be able to communicate just the same way they would do if they were physically located on a common network (Colombo, Laursen, Magnusson & Rossi‐Lamastra, 2012). The designer will, in this case, create two different LANs for each of the floors and then connect them using the virtual LAN.

The Primary Security Concerns and How to Lessen Them

The security concerns

The network setting in this office will be faced by lots of security concerns. Being a learn set up, there are a myriad of very likely challenges that have to be expected. The primary security concerns include keeping the network safe from cybercrime, securing Internet facing web, mail servers, and DNS, correcting the damages from the compromised systems, and averting the attacks that are launched from within, securing delicate and mission critical in-house resources such as the financial records, trade secrets, customer databases, among others, building an administrator framework to safely manage the network, putting in place systems for detection of logging and intrusion (Shiravi, Shiravi & Ghorbani, 2012). These in deed are challenges that pose great threat to the existence of organization and if not handled in time may crumble the organization altogether. Before even the commencement of the design process, the management should take measures by putting in place security policies or updating the existing ones to precisely reflect the company goals. In addition to that, a realistic assessment of the likely risks and identification of resources such as manpower, budget and hardware have to be done (Shiravi, Shiravi & Ghorbani, 2012). The design process can then begin once the identification of the security policy of the organization and its existing resources have been made.

How Lessen the Security Concerns

The designer can consider implementing a number of controls to lessen the abovementioned concerns. Topology, which is the physical and the logical layout of the network, should be first understood if a secure network is to be established. In this case, the offices to be connected by the network are located in two different floors with a floor in between them making them to be apart (Shiravi, Shiravi & Ghorbani, 2012). The server connectivity has to be provided to ensure network sharing within the offices which are located apart. Laying out the logical topology requires the consideration of the security policy, and the decision on the most suitable model. This implies that for the network to be secure from the imminent threats, the designer has to identify the parts of the network that have less trust and the ones that have more and also the groups of devices and user that have to be grouped together logically (Shiravi, Shiravi & Ghorbani, 2012). In this way, devices that perform similar functions and that have the same security profiles will be grouped together into user workstations, intranet servers and extranet servers. Creation of the separate security zones this way will enable the enforcement of the organization’s security policy with proper firewall rules and lists of layer 3 access.

During the design, a basic topology that makes it possible for the hosts’ grouping by function and implementation of security within layer 3 designs can be considered (Shiravi, Shiravi & Ghorbani, 2012). Layer 2 network design features should also be securely implemented to minimize the threats with which it is associated. There are also some other additional steps that can be taken to secure the LAN. These include installation of the intrusion detection systems, IP security (IPSEC), and privates VLANS (Shiravi, Shiravi & Ghorbani, 2012). The network designer has to carefully exercise planning of the network system and pay detailed attention to the likely network security loopholes while striving to meet the organization’s communication needs.

Detailed specifics the network design

Figure 1: A Basic Network Design

Figure 2: A collapsed core design