INFO813 : Networks and Infrastructure : Working Architecture of the Sy

Network upgrade proposal

 

Give 2 possible solutions which include: a requirements analysis, technology to be purchased and why it is suitable and beneficial to the company, cost analysis, work scope, timelines, Implementation schedule plan, Assumptions and risks for each solution. Analyse and Compare both solutions and give your final recommendations.

 

Disaster recovery plan and Business Continuity Plan

 

Outline appropriate systems to be put in place for the company to deal with a disaster, e.g. security attacks. Include disaster indicators, staff roles, technology used for disaster recovery, damage assessment, forensics, etc.

Area Network (LAN) that is comprised of limited bandwidth as the connection with all the computers are made with the help of a database such as the central database which contain  the information of the 5000 clients stored in it (Wang et al., 2015). These information are not encrypted. It is due to this reason that a functional database should be implemented for ensuring proper services. The existing infrastructure also consist a booking system that primarily focuses on serving that branch but now with many branches of the medical centre the booking software system needs to be updated (Waliullah, Moniruzzaman & Rahman, 2015).

Problems

The management of the medical centre aspires to expand the business and also aspires to upgrade the system because a new branch of the medical centre will involve many new users. The present networking infrastructure will not be able to serve the purposes of the medical centre as the current system only focuses on the main branch of the medical centre and the management system will not be able to serve the purposes when there will be several other branches (Algaet et al., 2015). For this reason, the current networking system needs an upgrade where the security will be kept as a major heading since there will be many other databases managing the records of several other users. The security issues should also be severely dealt with while upgrading the old networking system. The present database of the medical centre is having a limited storage for which there is a need of upgrading the new database (Donati et al., 2013). In upgrading the database the system may face a lot of issues regarding the crashing issue for which it is important to integrate the new system.

Project Goals

The project goals of the new system are stated as the following:

• Integrating the fog computing services for having a fast access of the system as the fog computing is based on arranging the a small cloud server that is closely located to the accessible area from where information can be easily stored and retrieved at the same time (Bonomi.et al., 2014).
• Full optimization of the network architecture to provide the users with an effective accessing experiencing of the system.
• Cyber security is a major issue while the implementation of the new network system and accordingly it will be addressed for providing an assurance about the quality of the services (Von Solms & Van Niekerk, 2013).

Cyber Security

The Multinational companies are subjected to a lot of hassles in course maintaining the privacy of data and the cyber security. Every enterprise is composed of several intricate details that needs special protection and can only be accessed with the grant of special permission (Hahn et al., 2013). On the other hand, these details can be subjected to the hackers and the attackers. After getting the valuable information these attackers may misuse this valuable information for which there is an urgent need to work on the cyber security.

In the world of commerce and marketing, executives are shifting their business in an online platform so that there is an expansion of the business. The prime risk is concerned about the cyber security and privacy of data as the businesses in the online platform is related about the consideration of the transactional services of the customers (Wells et al., 2014). This is pertained as the most intricate information and information security is very such essential to avoid the data loss and the denied access of the information. Hacking threats such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks will be taken into account for the online business because those hacking threats can be responsible for the websites and the web services to run through a downtime phase by letting an allowance of fake traffic during a specific period of time (Darwish, Ouda & Capretz, 2013). Those attacks may be held responsible for the loss of data and website crashes. There are several other services through which the problem can be sorted out but that would be very much expensive, for which a proper solution serving the problem at a reasonable cost is required.

The objectives and the aims of this report intends to supply with proper information about the security of services and the privacy of data. It also provides the architecture following which the issues can be sorted out. The solution that would be proposed will be cost effective using which the vendors can easily get the access to use the services. These services will be taken into account as these services play a major role in the market contribution. The details regarding the current security algorithms will be discussed in this report to prove that the provided solution is completely new and current in the present market of networking and security.

The following sections will provide an extensive reference to the network engineers as it will be covered up with all the information regarding the problems and the mitigation techniques about the network threats that are needed to be considered while implementing a new networking system (Ning, Liu & Yang, 2013). This report will also serve as a model for the cyber security solutions and the optimizing of the services through which the hacking threats such as the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) can be prohibited. DDoS attack is considered to be one of the most dangerous attacks in the cyber security domain because these attacks will completely destroy the web servers and disrupt the web services. Activists all over the world are working sorting out these malicious attacks and based on the same analogy this report also intends to provide a cost effective solution that will help in eradicating these attacks considering a specific region. In addition to that, this report also talks about the other network threats are also discussed in this report.

The DDoS attacks in the present marketplace conditions has been modified to a great extent which is capable of creating a havoc at a minimum cost. There are several types of DDoS threats that the organisations can face during processes online. SYN flood attacks, NTP reflection based attacks, DNS amplified attacks and the Application layer attacks are some of the well known DDoS attacks. To figure out the approximate number of threats that must be mitigated, a penetration test must be performed. The most common devices that are prone to threats are the computer devices and the portable devices (Abawajy, 2014). There must be a security policy whose objective will be to prevent the possibilities of a potential DDoS attack. There should be a proactive surveillance of the entire networking system. A surplus bandwidth should be provided to accompany the possible surges in the network traffic. The network parameters of the organisations should be taken into account and should be defended accordingly. The threats related to the Application layer should also be detected. In addition to that, a collaboration with the Internet Service Provider (ISP) is also required. If these conditions are not met, there is a high possibility that the organisation will be subjected to a DDoS attack stating Invalid source specified. This is one of the common threats out there and can pose a serious threat to the organisations, which might be shocking to the business domain. The economic systems along with the systems that serve customer insights are at greater risks due to these malicious threats. It is because of this reason that these systems must be kept under strict surveillance and provide with a strengthened security.

Generally, the large enterprises contain a separate group of team members that delivers in the focussing of the networking security. It is also seen that the IT team sometimes look after this networking issue. These teams also look after the development and the implementation of the security policy whose aim will be to resist and lessen the DDoS on the assets and the clients of the company. An ideal security policy should include the following arguments:

The network traffic should be kept under strict surveillance regularly. In case of getting affected with the malicious attacks it is the responsibility of the IT team to request the Internet Provider for the graphs and the records so that the company is able to go to its provider and successfully figure out the IP that is returning the Invalid source specified. There are different tools that help to survey the traffic and among them Netflow is considered to be the most enhanced tool that is responsible for monitoring. Generally a regular Netflow or a sampled Netflow is used depending on the available bandwidth and the dedicate hardware.

A network infrastructure is essential especially for the protection of the control pane of the hardware and the management. Utilisation of the authentication and the encrypted protocols should be done for the management of equipment. The authentication requests that are from outside the networks are needed to be completely filtered (Ben-Asher & Gonzalez, 2015). For accessing the routers and the switches, Out of Band (OOB) management is recommended and should be configured accordingly of those devices. Access control will be taken over by an AAA system (Cisco ACS) that is a two factor authentication using either the RADIUS or TACACS+. The ACS will be used to provide with different authorization levels that is related with the position of the employees and their skill sets on various fields. ACS will offer an audit trail during the time of accessing the portals. In addition to that Secure Shell (SSH) is needed to be used in accesing the routers and the switches.

Scanning and auditing of the networks along with the servers is required to take place in routine manner all along the year. In this mechanism the servers and the networking equipment is required to be scanned from an unknown IP address. The Nmap and Nessus scans is required to take place with an interval of four months. After this, the administrators of the system will be informed before the implementation of the scans, providing them with an opportunity to either fix the disputes of the system or eliminate the systems from the sandbox. Special attention should be made on these scan lists, as these scans are able to cease these services that can pose a negative effect on the productivity.

The original cost of the proposed networking system is expected to be around $300,000. The cost for the maintenance agreements is expected to be around $25,000 per year. The whole system is expected to be fully operational within the six months of getting the resources. The configuration and the installation phase will be provided with scheduled maintenance windows for the procedure of management. The configuration modifications is apprehended to take place during the non shift hours unless there is an urge to make during the shift hours. The system is also expected to provide the users with hassle free experience and reliability. The implementation procedure will also provide the users with the reduction of the threats thereby providing them with a shelter to where they can easily make transactions and store their valuable information. The system is also expected to be PCI-DSS compliant. It is expected as such because it reduces the liability risk in case there is an atrocious attack. All the above mentioned are some of the devices, policies and the mechanisms to reduce the risks of the DDoS attacks (Knowles et al., 2015). New ways are constantly being developed to counter the new hacking threats and other forms of malicious DDoS attacks. It is essential to keep this in mind that one of these mentioned solutions will surely work in providing an additional security to the networks. However, a network is still prone to attack no matter how much protection is designated for the protection of the network. The surveillance tools provide with an opportunity to detect attacks in the real time, keeping the traffic separate and lessening the impact. This not only provides a protection to the business but also allow an opportunity  to have a hassle free online experience.

However, there are certain limitations in the entropy method of this plan, as it is somehow ineffective when the network is subjected to multiple DDoS attacks. In multiple DDoS attacks, the attacking traffic targets several destinations for the attack resulting in the insignificance of the changes in entropy. A more effective detection algorithm for these type of cases is the flow initiation rate.

In the above mentioned algorithm the initial threshold is considered to be fixed at a certain level that is taken as the traffic level of acceptance for the network and at such rate the network will not face any trouble thereby operating freely. In the initial learning phase this threshold can be calculated by inferring the controller while the allowed traffic is going at an average to a very low rate. However, this threshold must be suitable for the network to depict the present flow of the traffic pattern.

Implementation of the Fog services

In the present day conditions the total amount of mobile users are increasing day by day as more number of users are implementing the mobile technologies for having a fluent communication experience. The users are more inclined towards using the reliable services for the communication and the process of storing data (Meurisch et al., 2017). Earlier it was hectic to store data in the physical data centres as it was much expensive in nature and there were several other factors that prohibited the set up of those data centres. The developers and other experts initialize the cloud computing services for the optimizing the data storage services (Stojmenovic & Wen, 2014). In the genre of cloud computing, the users are free to store and access data from anywhere as the cloud services are dependent on the online platforms for which the cloud databases are granted as the online databases. The involvement of the cloud services in a system is essential because the users get an easy opportunity to access the services. However, the cloud services are often subjected to latency issue and weak connection of the internet for which the concept of the Fog computing has come into play (Yi, Li & Li 2015).

The concept of fog computing mainly deals with the coverage of small areas in accordance to the users in that place. It is advantageous to cloud computing because the users and the servers are closely located and the latency rate is much lower (Dastjerdi & Buyya, 2016). The fog database is considered as the local database since the fog database is entirely structured on the local router of the user.

An example of the cloud computing is the usage of smartphones and the online services within the city (Aazam & Huh, 2014). This experience is improved with implementation of the fog computing where the access rate is much higher as compared to that of cloud computing. It is the fact cloud computing is much reliable service for the users for whom the latency and the received packet data is not a factor but for those who rely on these factors, cloud computing will not be enough as cloud computing is subjected to high latency rate and signal distortions (Zhu et al., 2013). This problem can be solved with the implementation of the fog computing because the data stored in the databases of cloud will be reused by fog computing in bettering the user experience. Fog computing is the extension of the cloud computing where the user experience is enhanced. Data security is another factor in distinguishing these two concepts. Due to the higher latency rate the data in cloud computing is vulnerable to several threats and attacks but that is not a concern in case of the fog computing because the latency rate is much lower for which it disallows any illicit access of the network.

Fog computing has a lesser scope as compared to that of the cloud computing for which the hardware storage and the power consumption is limited in fog computing (Stojmenovic, 2014). The interfaces of the wireless connections are also considered in a very limited amount because lesser number of users is given the access of the fog databases whereas there are more number of users in cloud computing for which the data consumption will also be more.

The access in the fog services is much faster and reliable because the communication is done among a small amount of users using a very simplified network structure. On the other hand, the data transmission  is much slower in the cloud services as there are more number of users in a particular region and also the latency rate is much higher as compared to that of the fog computing (Yannuzzi et al., 2014). The services of the fog services are mainly related with the local environment as the fog servers rely on the small transmission of data whereas the data transmission in clod is generally for large areas as huge data can be stored and retrieved. This is the reason for which the fog computing is cost effective to cloud computing (Deng et al., 2016).

                                          Figure 1: Network diagram of Fog computing enabled IoT system architecture.

                                                                                     (Source: Internet)

Presently every organisation is based upon keeping a track of their data. Earlier this method was much hectic and expensive. This needed an urgency of optimizing the databases for providing the maximum experience at a reasonable effort and cost. Data retrieval has now become dynamic in nature for which the access to the database has been limited and more reliance is on the local area network for the daily workflow (Masip-Bruin, 2016). This is the reason the enterprises are shifting towards using the cloud services as it is cost effective than other networks and more information can be easily stored. The cloud services are well encrypted as well.

Disaster Plan

Network traffic should be proactively monitored around the clock. In the case of an attack, the IT team should request graphs and logs for the attack IP so a company can go to its provider and identify the IP that is attack it.There are a several tools that we can use to monitor traffic. Netflow is the regarded as the most useful of the monitoring tools available. We will either use regular netflow or sampled netflow depending on the hardware and available bandwidth.

Protecting the management and control pane of hardware, specifically network infrastructure equipment is essential. Use authentication and encrypted protocols for equipment management.  Filter authentication requests from outside the network. Out of Band (OOB) management is the recommend method to access routers and switches and should be configured as such where available. Access will be controlled by an AAA system (Cisco ACS) two factor authentication using either RADIUS or TACACS+. We will use ACS to provide different authorization levels based on the employees position and level of knowledge. ACS will also provide an audit trail for logins. Also only secure shell (ssh) will be used to access routers and switches.

Auditing and scanning the network along with servers will take place routinely though out the year. Servers and networking equipment will be scanned from an outsider’s IP address. Nmap and Nessus scans will take place once per quarter. The system administrators will be advised prior to the scans taking place, giving them enough time to either fix issues or remove systems from the scan list. It should be noted that these scans can take down services which can have an adverse effect on productivity.

Business Continuity Plan 

Earlier it was hectic to store data in the physical data centres as it was much expensive in nature and there were several other factors that prohibited the set up of those data centres. The developers and other experts initialize the cloud computing services for the optimizing the data storage services (Stojmenovic & Wen, 2014). In the genre of cloud computing, the users are free to store and access data from anywhere as the cloud services are dependent on the online platforms for which the cloud databases are granted as the online databases. The involvement of the cloud services in a system is essential because the users get an easy opportunity to access the services. However, the cloud services are often subjected to latency issue and weak connection of the internet for which the concept of the Fog computing has come into play (Yi, Li & Li 2015).

Fog computing is based upon covering the smaller areas where the number of users are less. This is the reason for which the latency rate is much lower as compared to that of the cloud computing services. This is the reason for which for which the fog services are mostly based on the communication with other users using a local database over a local router.

On the other hand as the cloud services are available to many users within a specified region, that is larger as compared to the coverage of the fog services. Thus, it is evident that the cloud services need to use large databases as the information is much larger. Due to the usage of large databases the latency rate is much higher. It is for this reason that the fog computing services are preferred because of their reliability and high speed.

The scope of Fog computing is less than cloud computing that is why the hardware storage is limited as well as the power of computation is also limited and the wireless interfaces are also considered in limited amount because the number of users are limited to access the Fog servers whereas the storage in cloud servers are extensive because the numbers of users are from worldwide and the data will be of different types so the resources consumed will be more than the Fog server implementation (Luan, 2015).

The access to the Fog servers is fast and reliable because the communication can be done by a simple and the single hop network as the number of users of the region will be in a small range of area whereas the access of the cloud servers can be accessed all across the world but the latency will be high and the transmission of the services will be slow in accessing the cloud computing services.

The working environment of the Fog servers are based on the local areas because the nearest outdoor and the indoor areas can be covered by the Fog computing services while the working environment of the cloud computing services are based on the several warehouses where the information about the big data and the embedded systems can be stored .The storage and the environmental cost of the cloud services will be more then Fog servers implementation at the optimal workplace.

In the modern world, every business based on either large or small enterprises contains the information about the data which is not limited now a day. Previously the storage of the data was based on the physical databases which were too costly and unreliable such as the server room should be fully air conditioned which was costly and issues about the database crashing was existing in the previous time. When the amount of data increased, the physical databases were not enough so the researchers have decided to integrate the optimized database services to which the accessibility will be easy because in the physical databases, the access to database will be limited and rely on the local area network while the market of business is expanding day by day so the physical databases are not enough to complete the daily workflow of the small and the medium enterprises (Tao, 2014).

The researches introduced the technology of the cloud computing in which the database is online and the reliable while the storage of cloud database is more than the physical databases. Cost is one of the important factors in the business and administrations because every business person prefers to save the cost. Cloud services are less costly because there are no needs to set the extensive data centers for the physical databases on other hand the cloud databases are more secured than the physical databases because the cloud servers are well encrypted so an unauthorized person cannot access the database without appropriate authentication information.

The accessibility of the database at any specific location was not possible for the users in the era of physical databases but the cloud servers allow the users to send and receive the data information through the technology of internet.

Cost and Timeline 

The actual cost of the recommended system is expected to be $300,000. The maintenance agreements are expected to be $25,000 per year. Expect the entire system to be fully operational within 6 months of receiving the equipment. During the configuration and installation phase we will provide scheduled maintenance windows with management. Configuration changes are expected to occur during off hours unless there is a need for the change to happen during business hours. We expect the system to provide a faster more reliable network for the users and customers. Implementation will also decrease threat vectors, providing a safe place for customers to make purchases and store their personal information.

Activity	Expected time
Hardware installation	0-1 month
Software upgradations	0-1.5 months
Analysis of the design	0-15 days
Testing of the system	0-2 months
Stakeholder activities	0-10 days