West Consulting Modular Design Proposal

University Of Phoenix

NTC/320

3/5/18

Summary

The proposed network design is considering current setup and how to easily adapt new buildings and systems with limited cost by making each campus as wireless as possible for all new connections. This design will interconnect the internet into the existing LAN infrastructure and then simply bridge current connectivity over to the main new building 3 location. The china location will have its own ISP connection and simply connect back to the main campus with a firewall and VPN connection to avoid costly installations of data centers since the employee load will initially be very light at 30 people.

Network Proposal

The current setup that the company has really is a workable solution that I believe can remain at a cheaper cost for expansion as long as the company has the current equipment in place. Fiber optic cables are capable of handling a powerful connection and are relatively capable of handling a decent load on the current setup. The key to the connectivity will be that each floor is setup with a wireless cisco access point so that it will allow each user to wirelessly connect to the internal servers and data centers without the need to connect to the system with cables.

The company seems to have one option in mind when it comes to the network that they are attempting to create, and that would be cost effectiveness. The good thing about this particular company is that it already has a decent infrastructure in place that can be easily expanded to the third building through a network bridge and if necessary boosters to amplify the signal between the buildings if the firewire connection would weaken or wirelessly with amplifiers of that nature as well. The idea in mind with this network design was to keep the system as wireless as possible so that the end users can connect anywhere in the building to company resources in data without requiring the user to connect with a direct Ethernet connection to access company data.

With the wireless access points in place it will be easier for employees to take their laptops on the go to each conference room with a seamless connection between each system in the network. From personal experience working with bridges I decided that it would be best to run a bridge from the current setup over to the third building wireless access points since the system is already supporting a high standard firewire cabling system to its wireless networks which I believe to be a sufficient setup under my current understanding. Then those users will not need to have access to anything like VPN since they are still on the same network that other users are currently running off. If needed we may recommend installing additional wireless booster access points in courtyards so that employees will not lose needed connectivity between buildings as I have personally seen other companies utilize.
The china location will probably be the trickiest part of them all since they are in a location that will not allow us to connect them to our current internet service provider (ISP) so they will require their own separate modem setup to connect with a ISP in that location. Then the plan to keep cost down in that location is to have no physical servers on site but to simply treat it as if an employee were to work from home they would connect via VPN to remote directly or patch into our current servers via the internet on the secured VPN client. We would also put up a secondary firewall to protect the network from intrusion should any of the clients that are among the 30 remoting in should be compromised on their individual pc’s. We would also recommend setting up a virus protection software as an extra layer of security on the network overall.

Some locations would probably have servers on site if they are so far away from their network home to store information however to keep cost down we believe that the VPN connection would be the most cost effective and probable solution for the company to use making it easy and simple to get them up in running closer to the 4 month window which will save the company valuable time, resources and money for each network location which is something that is important in any network solution that is to be designed for any company overall. Overall I believe this network solution will provide our clients with the fastest, easiest and most secure option for a network connection based on the cost-conscious budget they want to stick under to provide their employees to work with on a day to day basis within the company.