Summary

In this chapter, we covered key planning and design considerations you should undertake before beginning your ISA Server rollout. We highly recommend that you put a good deal of time into the planning phase before you begin to roll out your ISA Server solution. If you know what you need to accomplish prior to the actual execution of your task, you minimize the chances of security breaches during the implementation phase of your plan.

We discussed important issues related to preparing the computer software and hardware for ISA Server. The base requirements for ISA Server are not extreme, but they do need to match the requirements for the level of service you expect ISA Server to provide. The more users who will access the server, the higher the hardware requirements.

You learned about important planning issues regarding network configuration and what to consider when planning your internal and external interfaces. You need to be sure that all interfaces on the ISA server computers are as free from potential security holes as possible, since the ISA server will likely be one of the primary gateways into your internal network.

Internet access for your organization is a mission-critical concern. Therefore, you need to ensure that a high level of fault tolerance is built into your ISA Server solution. We discussed some methods you can put into play when building a fault-tolerant ISA Server deployment.

Finally, we covered some basic issues regarding Internet access and DNS issues. The DNS configuration will be one of your most challenging planning issues, and it must be set up correctly to make internal resources accessible to external hosts and external resources accessible to internal hosts.