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. 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. Learning Outcomes

• Communicate effectively and professionally in writing using appropriate tools.
• Analyze a range of server solutions to make evidenced-based decisions on the combination of technologies that gives the best solution for a specified business scenario.
• Demonstrate their ability to manage a range of common services and justify the methods of delivering those services.
• Identify and discuss server administration concepts, principles, and practices.
• Identify and offer solutions to a range of server monitoring problems.
• Evaluate a range of solutions that provide a secure server configuration to meet business requirements.
• Demonstrate understanding of a range of server monitoring techniques with due consideration of potential legal, professional, and ethical issues.

Scenario

A recent minor outage has alerted senior management to the importance of 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 aging 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:

1. Internally facing
   • Active Directory Domain Services
   • DNS
   • DHCP
   • Internal File Sharing Services
2. Externally facing
   • Web Server – Apache, PHP, and MySQL

The company has a limited budget for this upgrade. Therefore, you have to consider how many servers and which operating systems are required, in order to achieve such a requirement.

Smith Logistics has emphasized 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 that 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.