Network Design Assessment Item 2

Executive Summary

In designing a network, the company Smart Pharmacy is considered where it specializes in working for both international and national franchise clients based in Australia. The company is established in Botany, NSW Australia, through supplying medical services to worldwide franchises. By utilizing the top down approach of the network design, Smart Pharmacy has made an identical network design, which can address the technical and business goals, it provides proper security, user-friendly design and solutions without cloud intervenes.

Moreover, the report provides a detailed section regarding the project testing and planning utilizing the top down approach the project scope and goals have also been stated. A logical and physical diagram of the network has been provided which describes all about the location of devices along with security techniques. The DMZ zone for the servers that has been implemented is installed for isolating those devices from external vulnerabilities. Therefore, the tables of hardware requirements have also been provided along with explanation of its uses. At the end of the report, it has discussed about the routing and switching protocols along with testing plan and scripts.

Goal of the project

Designing network architecture for a corporate organization with diverse application, end-user device and user community mix is a complex task for majority of the networking teams. In this project its goal is to develop a secure network design of Smart Pharmacy in Australia. The report will be explaining the project regarding network topology of the organization and the number of equipment required in making the project. Utilizing the top down approach the design of the network will be followed to provide a cost effective solution in a efficient way between the franchise clients and the company

Scope of the project

The project scope is the portion of the project that involves in documenting the list of cost, functions, features, deadlines of specific goals. The project scope for the Smart pharmacy includes the design of the network utilizing the top down methodology such that it can provide an efficient and cost effective solution to business.

The design of the network requires communicating with the medicine delivery persons by locations tracking and distributing the order information that requires to be delivered to the patients at their home. The order confirmation will be done by the franchise clients by viewing the inventory stocks before delivery.

The scope is also to accomplish the goals of business like providing better products, services at affordable costs and in effective way. The technical goals concern about the protection of franchise clients and data of sales along with making a highly secured design of network, which can communicate the delivery persons and vehicles at Botany, NSW office. It allows the customers to check the orders for offering endorsement through online system.

The scope of the proposed project and its limitations will not intervene solutions of cloud and missing data such as the number of vehicles, number of patients, number of clients and entire budget for the project and the availability percentage required.

Business goals and project constraints

Business goals

According to the provided case study, organizational goals of the business for Smart Pharmacy are 3 key goals and they are as follows:

• Smart Pharmacy and its first goal are to purchase its products from various manufacturers across the globe and will be delivering to each franchise at affordable cost in effective way and it can develop a better service to customers.
• The second goal is to deliver better price-oriented products to patients (Clement and Puranam 2018). It can accomplish by minimizing the delivery operation cost from nearest local medicine providers to the location of clients.
• The third goal is to provide a well efficient website where the patients or customers can browse through entire products of SP and selecting the franchise pharmacy and the products they will be capable of paying online and collect the products at chosen franchise.
• Another goal is the on-tracking of vehicles for delivery and on- viewing of orders to be permitted by the customers before providing by vehicles to customers or patients.

Business constraints

No solution based on cloud storage is the limitation of the project, which would enable modern technology for fewer investments associated to constraints of cost.

The data regarding budget of the project will be beneficial for the network design more accurately, which is missing in this context.

List of Technical Goals and Tradeoffs

Technical Goals

• Both for the sales and client, the security of data are required to be considered in the network design.
• The utilization of cloud solution is not inspired and thus the servers are required to be located at Botany, NSW offices physically with entire transactional data (Karmakar et al. 2020)
• A protected connection is between the Botany office and delivery vehicles required to be accomplished.

Tradeoffs

• Scalability is not required for the current business, but it can be acknowledged that the industry could enhance its growth in the future.
• Around 95% availability could be accomplished depending on the design of Smart Pharmacy network.
• The performance will increase, as the response time for server and entire communication of the devices for good score.
• One of the key concerns of the business goals is security of the sales and client’s sensitive data (Evtodieva et al. 2016)
• The manageability for the network device and tools requires extra staffs for any type of physical issues
• As there are minimum software and hardware required, the affordability would be a good point for the business requirements.
• The usability will be considered at all user levels as a core function, if the organization is to focus on its requirements.

1. Affordability: 20
2. Adaptability: 5
3. Usability: 5
4. Manageability: 5
5. Security: 15
6. Network performance: 20
7. Availability: 20
8. Scalability: 10

Total: 100

Table of Data Stores, Network Applications, User Communities, and Traffic Flows

User Communities

Below table depicts the user communities and therefore, all of them are assumed:

Table 1: User communities

Data stores

Table 2: Data stores

Network Applications along with the Traffic Flows

Table 3: Network applications that are used along with the traffic flows

Justification and explaining the design of the logical network

The logical diagram provided in this section will consider the technical goals and the business, which has been developed using the top down approach. The assumptions have been made for the delivery vehicles, which are connected to the network using the cellular network by the Virtual Private Number (VPN). An enterprise server is utilized by SP only cannot be utilized by external users. The public access servers like DNS, FTP and webserver are secured in DMZ by separating the servers from inner network. Through filtering the malevolent traffic, the DMZ zone is protected by firewall.

On both the switches, the users are connected to the staff’s devices like to a standard printer, PC and a telephone. The below diagram is classified into access, distributed and core layer. It has the user community utilizing the network resources. Between the access and core layer, the distribution layer is present, which supports rapid communication between the departments and prevents a direct link from the core devices. Moreover, the DMZ servers are isolated from the network LAN as they are accessed publicly and thus it is made to isolate from its internal network in order to have a robust security. The enterprise server networks are utilized for internal means for the development of business and are utilized for only office purpose.

Moreover, there are two switches that are connected to users in order to avoid single point failure and therefore, the people share a standard office printer. Alongside, there is a telephone that will work utilizing voice over internet protocols.

The GPS enabled vehicles that are provided is made of assumption and it is ensured that every vehicle’s person will be utilizing the technology of VPN software according to requirement of SP.

Logical Network Diagram

Figure: Logical Network diagram of SP

(Source: Created by Learner)

IP addressing scheme

Table 4: IP addressing scheme of SP

(Source: Created by learner)

List of routing and switching protocols, and security mechanisms

Routing

Switching

Security mechanisms

Smart Pharmacy has some security mechanism on its network layers referenced to OSI layers connection.

Physical layer

In this specific layer, the physical network cables that are connected are exposed to minimize and destroy the communication availability. Thus, to overcome this issue, the utilization of access cards and surveillance cameras in SP are required.

Data link layer

The switch and its protection are requiring through blocking the unutilized ports. So, a logical security by utilizing the protocol of WPA2 is needed for WLAN communications and thereafter, a VLAN can be utilized to isolate the user group utilizing the applications or the server

Network Layer

It is the core layer in the network design and is more likely to be attacked from external side. So a robust password utilizing suitable protocol configuration of VPN or ACL is needed.

Transport layer

The data encryption in this layer will be secured through developing authenticity by utilizing Secure socket layer to get the SSH and https in accessing the databases

Application layer

The DNS and Websewrver protection can be secured through utilizing high end firewalls, which can monitor the traffic by filtering it and thus make a good policy of protection.

Physical layer

At Botany, NSW office, a role based access will be provided to users that will provide a privilege and responsibility to them while accessing network data. Therefore, utilizing access cards will be needed for entering or exiting from office.

Physical network diagram

Figure 2: Physical diagram of SP

(Source: Created by learner)

Networking & communication devices and applications

Justification of the networking & communication devices and applications required

Router: The selected router will be utilized to interact with VPN access and configure NAT.

Firewall: The inner network and DMZ can be secured to filter the user packets

Switches: The selected switch will be supporting the bandwidth for the flow of traffic across the network

Server: The selected server can be utilized for multiple user access and Virtual machines

Printer: The selected printer can deliver multiple jobs developed at single signal

Telephone: The selected telephone model is for SP and will be connected to internet access.

Test plan

Table: Testing plan

References

Bhardwaj, A., Subrahmanyam, G.V.B., Avasthi, V. and Sastry, H., 2016. Design a resilient network infrastructure security policy framework. Indian Journal of Science and Technology, 9(19), pp.1-8.

Clement, J. and Puranam, P., 2018. Searching for structure: Formal organization design as a guide to network evolution. Management Science, 64(8), pp.3879-3895.

Dadheech, K., Choudhary, A. and Bhatia, G., 2018, April. De-Militarized Zone: A Next Level to Network Security. In 2018 Second International Conference on Inventive Communication and Computational Technologies (ICICCT) (pp. 595-600). IEEE.

Evtodieva, T.E., Davydova, N.N., Videneeva, S.V. and Fedorov, V.A., 2016. The Concept of Network Organization and Design of Networks in Logistics. International Journal of Economic Perspectives, 10(3).

Habibullah, K.M., Rondeau, E. and Georges, J.P., 2018. Reducing energy consumption of network infrastructure using spectral approach. In Technology for Smart Futures (pp. 235-250). Springer, Cham.

Iovan, A. and Robu, R., 2016, February. Handling of the demilitarized zone using service providers in SAP. In IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (Vol. 106, No. 1, p. 012003).

Karmakar, K.K., Varadharajan, V., Tupakula, U., Nepal, S. and Thapa, C., 2020, June. Towards a Security Enhanced Virtualised Network Infrastructure for Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). In 2020 6th IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft) (pp. 257-261). IEEE.

Sheikh, A.F., 2020. Network Fundamentals and Infrastructure Security. In CompTIA Security+ Certification Assignment Guide (pp. 9-34). Apress, Berkeley, CA.Network Fundamentals and Infrastructure Security. In CompTIA Security+ Certification Assignment Guide (pp. 9-34). Apress, Berkeley, CA.