Case Study

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You should give yourself 20 minutes to review this testlet and complete the questions.

Background

Infinite Horizons is a human resources consulting firm. It is located in Rochester, NY. It has been growing at the rate of 20 percent a year and currently has 200 employees at its headquarters in Rochester. Approximately 175 of the 200 employees are consultants. The consultants often work at many of the customers’ sites.

Computers

The network headquarters consist of 13 Windows Server 2003 machines and 200 Windows XP Professional workstations. Of the 200 workstations, 175 are laptop users. One of the servers is running SQL Server 2000 to support a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) for the sales department. The company maintains a firewall. All the users have been granted dial-in permissions. The company maintains a VPN server and dial-up access because most of the employees connect from remote locations to the network. Employees can also use Outlook Web Access (OWA) to check their e-mail via a web browser.

WAN Connectivity

The company has a DSL connection to the Internet at 1.5Mbps.

LAN Connectivity

The LAN runs on a 100Mbps network.

Security

The folks at Infinite Horizons pride themselves in maintaining confidentiality of all customers’ data; therefore, security is very important to them. They have implemented password policies and their internal network is protected by a firewall. They have had laptops stolen that contained customer data in the past. They have also had some internal security lapses where shares had the incorrect permissions and employees had access to confidential customer data.

Infinite Horizons needs to protect data between its customers and its corporate headquarters.

Network Usage and Roles

Human Resources Department The HR department uses a database application to maintain resumes and employee information. It also has a file server that stores additional employee confidential information like annual reviews.

IT Department The IT department maintains and supports the network. Members of this department implement physical and network security.

The help desk resolves first-level support issues and issues with employees’ computers.

The server administrators group builds the network and resolves the company’s server and network issues.

Sales Department The sales staff stores shared documents in a share called SALES and personnel sales documents on their local computers. They also need access to a SQL Server 2000 server that hosts their customer relations application and a lead-tracking system. They need to store some of the data on their laptops so it is available whenever they are not connected to the network.

Consultants Consultants use the network to communicate with each other. They are required to fill out forms in the intranet-based time tracking application. They also need to get access to proposals that certain managers are working on to help author them, and they need secure access to their e-mail through the Web.

Security Policy

All users must securely authenticate on the network.

Data that is stored on laptop computers must be secure.

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