ICT703 Network Technology and Management Proof Reading Services

ICT703 Network Technology and Management Proof Reading Services

Introduction

Colour Ability Corporation (CAC) is a small marketing and advertising firm with currently 80 employees. They are planning a move to a new office building where they can allocate a separate floor to each of their four departments, in addition to opening a new office in another city to carter to clients there. The new office is to host 8 local employees. This new move and expansion can be a way to increase productivity and profit for the organization and as such, an upgrade of IT resources is in order. It is needful to strategize on how to meet the new company needs of having company emails, networked printers, a wireless network, and a file sharing infrastructure. This will be achieved by planning on installing a new operating system. A newer operating system offers improved hardware support and security. Newer technology of printers enhances printing and thus production speed, quality and durability if chosen well. To support a wireless network business environment, a hardware upgrade is advisable. This involves purchase of new computers, and wireless network access points

Proposal

Needs for CAC

1. CAC wants an ISP that will provide custom email accounts to its employees for use only at work. This email addresses are different from the ones CAC employees had before.
2. CAC wants a color printer that will be able to be shared by the members of the various departments at CAC.
3. CAC wants a working network design that will suit the four-story building in Brisbane and also help them in realizing the business profit.
4. CAC wants each of the five departments to be able to have access to wireless internet
5. CAC wants computers that will be able to enable them to efficiently and effectively perform their filming activities that are of tight deadlines.
6. CAC would want an operating system that will support the software for film production.

Methodology and timetabling

The methodology used to present this proposal was through the use of activities where information was collected, analyzed carefully before it was presented. The activities are one to seven mostly consisting of plan forms. Activity one is making a computer planning system form, activity two is selecting a high speed color copier printer for CAC, activity three is demonstrating a network design for CAC, activity four is planning the internet connectivity, activity five is to determine which internal services will be offered by CAC, activity six is to complete a network form, activity seven revolves around planning of the network installation and activity eight addresses the network security measures

Timetabling

Activity 1: Computer System Planning Form

Shared components

1. printers
2. switches
3. routers

Activity 2: high-speed,colorcopier/printer for the CAC offices

1. Lexmark CS410dtn Color Laser Printer
2. It has a fast print speed of 30 pages per minute.
3It is compatible with the selected Windows 10 operating system.
4. It is a workgroup printer which supports network printing.
5. It retails at approximately $649 which is relatively affordable for a small organization.
6. It is light in weight.
7. It is power efficient and with low noise levels

Activity 3: network layout for CAC requirements

Activity 4: Comparison worksheet for local ISPs

Activity 5: Internal services

1. Bridge: this device needs to be purchased by CAC. It functions to connect each subnetwork to be part of the same major network, such that the subnet on each floor or office is connected to the main network by the bridge.

2. Repeater: this network device amplifies the signal it receives. It regenerates and then transmits the boosted signals at a power similar in strength to the original one so that the signal is not lost as it is transmitted from the server to client work station.

3. Router: this device is responsible for directing traffic from the local area network to the internet. Its function is to route the data packets sent to the correct internet addresses (Jang and Pan 2010).

4. Modem: This device performs the dual function of converting outgoing digital signals into analog signals, and then converting incoming analogue signals into digital signals. This enables electromagnetic signals to be understood by a computer, and the digital marketing signal generated by a computer to be transportable over the analog telephone network.

5. Switch: it has the function to filter and forward data packets between network hosts.

6. Wireless Access Point: provides network access by generating a Wi-Fi signal to which other devices can connect(Mittal, Belding and Suri 2008). The AP allows for the total bandwidth to be equally available to all network users.

7. Firewall: this security device performs network monitoring and filtering to control both outgoing and incoming connections. It is implemented as either hardware or software.

Activity 6: Network Planning

Planning of the installation

Activity 7: sub netting and addressing schemes for CAC

Activity 8: Security plan

1. Use firewalls

Deploy two firewalls which will separate the intranet from the internet. These firewalls will filter incoming and outgoing communication to validate that they are allowed (Rezvani and Aryan 2009)

2. Filter Egress Traffic to protect intranet

This involves restricting addresses that local workstations in the intranet can access. It prevents malicious programs from getting onto the host then ex-filtrating data to an attacker. This also prevents erroneous exfiltration and exfiltration due to configuration errors in NetBIOS or DNS to external parties. Detecting exfiltration is achievable through logging of network traffic activity.

3. Firmware update

Regularly check for, and install firmware updates for the routers, as well as software and driver updates for the workstations.

4. Restrict traffic to allowed devices only

Switch on logging of devices and network activity. This allows for monitoring such that only devices with appropriate IP range of company addresses can access the internal network resources.

5. Encryption

Enable Access Point Encryption such as WPA or WPA2 to protect data sent over that network (Elminaam, Abdual-Kader and Hadhoud 2010)

6. Secure the 802.1X client settings

To prevent a man-in-the-middle attack, utilize server verification on the client side. This prevents the client from passing the Wi-Fi login credentials to the RADIUS server until it verifies it’s communicating with a legit server.

Budget Summary

Future plans

Colour Ability corporation plans to employ more employees in the Sydney office. The employees will include the department manager responsible for allocating jobs, contracting part time workers and managing payrolls, a film production editor whose responsibility is to produce and edit films under tight deadlines and six other employees which will consist of two production assistants, two camera people, a production manager, and a film director who will only be in the office two days in a week. Most of their time will be spent in the field producing films.

Recommendations

In view of the requirements analyzed, this report recommends the following:

The entire organization should upgrade the operating systems to Windows 10. This is because at least some of the employees need this version of operating system to support their functions and it is recommended that all employees use the same operating system for ease of training and support.

It has been analyzed that a Lexmark CS410dtn Color Laser Printer would be suitable for the organization as it offers speed and quality at an affordable price.

The recommended processor is the Intel brand because it offers a wide range of graphics and audio cards which would be suitable for the various departments at a reasonable cost.

The company should lay down their own network infrastructure and only engage a carrier grade ISP to provide internet connectivity and webmail. Carrier grade ISP is recommended because of greater geographical coverage and better technical support.

Conclusion

This network and IT infrastructure upgrade is necessary for the company as it will lead to better productivity. Faster hardware, better file sharing and communication infrastructure will bring efficiency that will lead to profit. The new network will come with security measures in place that will secure the organization’s files, and will allow the mobile film crew to communicate and share work better with the office employees. The initial set up will be costly but the durability of the proposed devices will lead to low maintenance costs. It has also been established that the upgrade can be done within the three months after which the company is due to change premises to their new office.

References

1. Elminaam, D.S.A.,Abdual-Kader, H.M. and Hadhoud, M.M., 2010. Evaluating the performance of symmetric encryption algorithms. [online]. IJ Network Security, 10(3), pp.216-222. Ramadan. Minufiya University. Available from:https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e2bc/791344a938ead55f77a2b2fd43949dbedc6f.pdf. [Accessed 28 September 2018]
2. Intel, 2018. 5th Generation Intel® Core™ i3 Processors. [ONLINE] Available at: https://ark.intel.com/products/series/84981/5th-Generation-Intel-Core-i3-Processors. [Accessed 28 September 2018].
3. Intel, 2018. 8th Generation Intel® Core™ i7 Processors. [ONLINE] Available at: https://ark.intel.com/products/series/122593/8th-Generation-Intel-Core-i7-Processors. [Accessed 28 September 2018].
4. Intel, 2018. Integrated Audio for Today and Tomorrow. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/chipsets/high-definition-audio.html. [Accessed 28 September 2018].
5. Jang, W. and Pan, D.Z., 2010. An SDRAM-aware router for networks-on-chip. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, 29(10), pp.1572-1585. Canada. IEEE. Available from:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5580227[Accessed 28 September 2018]
6. Mittal, K., Belding, E.M. and Suri, S., 2008. A game-theoretic analysis of wireless network access point selection by mobile users. [online]. Computer Communications, 31(10), pp.2049-2062. Santa Barbara. University of California. Available from: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014036640800025X. [Accessed 28 September 2018]
7. Rezvani, M. and Aryan, R., 2009, December. Analyzing and resolving anomalies in firewall security policies based on propositional logic. [online]. In Multitopic Conference, 2009. INMIC 2009. IEEE 13th International (pp. 1-7). Islamabad.IEEE. Available from:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5383125[Accessed 28 September 2018