Design And Implementation Of A Secure Server Network Assessment

1.Introduction

Your assessment is “Design and Implementation of a Secure Server Network”. You are required to write a report to explain your work. In this assessment, you are expected to work individually. This assessment is worth 100% of the total module marks.

2.Your Work

2.1 Introduction

You are required to design and build an internet-connected secure server network for Smith Logistics, which is a medium size warehouse and logistics company.

2.2 Scenario

the company’s IT system to the day-to-day operations and has given more weight to your company’s recommendation for upgrading.

Currently, the existing network infrastructure has been shoe-horned onto an ageing server which is running Windows 2003 Small Business Server with clients as old as Windows XP and some as new as Windows 10. The company acknowledges that, given recent network and computer system breaches such as WannaCry, that they need to update their IT infrastructure and are looking to create a more secure IT infrastructure with room for expansion.

Due to the current company data governance framework, the company has no plan to move to a cloud solution yet, apart from the email service, such as Office 365. Therefore, the current plan is to upgrade their existing network to a fault tolerant server network, which can spread existing workloads across multiple servers. You will also need to build Windows 10 clients which you can join to the domain to use to help document that all the services are working correctly.

The required workloads across the servers are:

• Internally facing
  • Active Directory Domain Services
  • DNS
  • DHCP
  • Internal File Sharing Services
• Externally facing
  • Web Server – Apache, PHP and MySQL The company has limited budget for this upgrade. Therefore, you have to consider how many servers and which operating systems are required, in order to achieve such requirement.

Smith Logistics has emphasised that they want to take this opportunity to strengthen their network security and are looking for you to explain what security considerations and/or improvements you can make as you outline the solution.

Smith Logistics store a lot of information and data, and they want to ensure that their servers, in particular, their file server has the appropriate disk redundancy in place so that they can tolerate disk failures without having to depend upon a backup solution. They also acknowledge that given they are rebuilding their entire server infrastructure they will also need to revisit backup options and have therefore asked you for advice both on disk redundancy and backup solutions.

They are also concerned about application compatibility so have requested that you create a mock up of the proposed environment which they can then use to test their in-house applications and externally facing website. This will allow them, in the event there are any issues to resolve these before the final switch is made. As such you will be required to make detailed documentation of the environment you create for testing to ensure that it can be accurately re-created for the live migration.

2.3 Your Report

You are to assume the role of the assigned technical lead for this proposal and have been tasked with creating the initial mock environment and associated documentation. Write a report which should at a minimum contain:

• A network diagram, including IP addresses. (10%)
• A recommendation and explanation of chosen disk redundancy and backup solutions for the final build (does not need simulating). (10%)
• Documentation for each network services component, such as AD DS, DNS and DHCP, describing briefly it’s function and explaining what dependencies it may have and/or how it interacts with other components on the network. (20%)
• Documentation might include IP Addresses of servers, DHCP Options, DNS Forward Lookup zones, Websites setup, etc.
• You do not need to discuss any network devices, e.g., switches and routers.
• Documentation of a proof-of-concept network, evidencing the setup and configurations made using screenshots. (25%)
• Client machine evidence should be used to demonstrate that the wider system works.
• Internet connectivity is expected for both servers and clients.
• Recommendations of potential hardware based upon recommended specifications for operating systems and services along with indicative pricing. (5%)
• The report is expected to address any potential legal, ethical or security issue that may be present throughout the body of work. (5%)

Your report could also optionally include:

• Pro-active advice on identifying single points of failure and possible recommendations to mitigate or eliminate these. (5%)
• Pro-active advice for improving security and possible recommendations for future actions. (5%)
• Pro-active security advice including policy recommendations for the new network. (5%)

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