Network Security Memorandum

Our network is in need of serious revisions and alterations in the following key areas, Availability, Reliability, Response Time and Throughput. There have been many complaints on lagging and non-existent network access from the users of which focus’s to these key areas.

In a summarization users are experiencing difficulty logging into the domain at the start of their day. As you could imagine this is a frustrating problem being it is the beginning of the day and they are already faced with an obstacle. Needless to say this as well as other problems leaves a bad image for the IT dept and all who work under it. Below are a few considerations which may help the situation at hand as well as create a more stable network to support the users and various staff within the organization.

As was mentioned above certain users had difficulty logging into the domain during morning hours. This could be the result of many things which may be preventing the domain controller from authenticating the users or simply taking too long to do so. A possible cause for this may be the fact that backups are being hosted on the domain controller and are in turn still running while users are trying to log in while it is using all available resources. Research of setting up a proper backup server as well as conversing with IT professionals of other companies have shown that it is a better decision to remove the backup server from the domain controller and host it on its own free standing server. This in turn increases network availability through the use of users being able to log in and utilize any specific functions the server offers such as DNS, DHCP and other services.

Another area to be concerned with is the equipment itself as well as the physical wiring within the organization. To start age has by far put the equipment into an antiquated state, Servers have been upgraded throughout the years to support the increased demand of the organization and meet the specific needs of the users. However with each

machine at full capacity for upgrades given its age a new solution must be looked after. Upon research vendors require a service life expectancy to be used for the servers. This specifies that when the life expectancy of a machine has surpassed the vendors honored warrantee, the machine has become a liability. Upon further research, results showed that the majority of organizations utilize servers until the vendor support contract is no longer able to be renewed. From there they purchase new equipment and either use the older equipment as a trade or develop a development platform. This in turn allows critical testing of the network and devices in place to perform research and design new ways to increase the reliability of the network from the inside. My recommendation would be to use your vendor and source new equipment to replace all the antiquated servers within the network. This will in turn increase reliability of the equipment as well as the reliable operation of the network itself.

While passing through the halls, I got the opportunity to converse with a few users. I asked them of their experiences with the network and if they have been favorable. Unfortunately I received mixed opinions more bad than good. However most of this had to do with response times associated with the network. Out of curiosity I watched one of the users demonstrate her claim as she tried to open a word document hosted on the file server which took almost a full minute to pull up. This is a serious problem especially since the File Server