Case Study

You have been named the network administrator for a large insurance firm. Your responsibility is to come up with a plan for the network infrastructure, which includes number of servers, network security devices, desktops, laptops and handheld devices. The plan should be carefully crafted to show all the necessary details in deploying the infrastructure (LANs, firewalls, routers, switches, IDS and sensors, servers, database servers, and addressing scheme) including specifics about the configurations. An understanding of the security issues the company is facing in order to conduct its business has to be reflected in the security aspects of the infrastructure (you should justify why a security measure is taken and how it will affect the enterprise business).

The insurance firm has ten offices (satellite sites) located in ten different cities around United States. There is the headquarters which is located close to two of the other offices. The enterprise network consists of a main site, a backup site and ten satellite sites. All the satellite sites are connected to the main site as individual networks. The satellite sites are dealing with different specialized type of insurances such as house insurance (3 sites), auto insurance (4 sites) and commercial insurance (3 sites). The sites need to have access to the central database of the firm besides their own databases. Each of the sites has roughly one hundred employees except for the headquarters which has 350. Ten percent of the employees are agents who are actively going out in the field for claims or client recruitment. Given the nature of the business, all the employees require internet access. Email services are required as well. The company uses customized software to interface to the databases and has a web interface for the customer to interact with the company. Each side of the business has its own database, however, the management, which is located at the headquarters, must have access to all the information. The Human Resources department has its own database and so does the payroll department. Each of these departments has a staff of 15 people.

Your plans should contain diagrams that describe the networks at the satellite sites, at the headquarters and how they are interconnected, including the backup site.

The CTO of the firm has also decided to use virtualization and asked you to look into it. You are supposed to give a detailed plan regarding which portions of the network have to be targeted for virtualization and why. You are also supposed to lay off a plan on how to proceed with this technology and show how it would affect the infrastructure that you have previously designed without using virtualization.