Network Infrastructure And Security

Introduction
An enterprise’s agility and productivity depend on more than just hardworking employees and excellent equipment. Running a smooth operation also requires a robust, clean and secure network infrastructure. The true combination of hardware and software resources of the network, which enables connectivity, communication, operations and management of enterprise network.
Provide path between users, services and applications, processes and to other network (Internet). Network infrastructure is typically part of every enterprise network, which works as a backbone to support the entire system and process throughout the enterprise.
The entire network infrastructure is interconnected, and can be used for internal and external communications.

Understanding Network Infrastructure Components

Network hardware:

• Router
• Switch
• LAN card
• Wireless Router / Access Points
• Cables (cat5, ca5e, cat6, cat7)
• Cable connectors (RJxx) RJ= Registered Jack
• Hubs
• Load balancers
• Storage Area Network (SAN)
• DNS

Network Software:

• Network operations and management
• Operating systems (NOS)
• Firewall
• Network security applications

Network Services:

• T-1 Line
• DSL
• ADSL
• IP Addressing
• Satellite
• Wireless Protocols

Expanded functions of some common devices and applications:

1. Routers and Switches:
Routers connect networks of your infrastructure, enabling systems to communicate.In a similar vein, switches connect systems within a network.

2. Firewall Access Control:
Firewalls sit between a router and application servers to provide access control. Firewalls were originally used to protect a trusted network (yours) from the untrusted network (the Internet). These days, it is becoming more common to protect application servers on their own (trusted, isolated) network from the untrusted networks (your network and the Internet).Router configurations add to the collective firewall capability by screening the data presented to the firewall. Router configurations can potentially block undesired services (such as NFS, NIS, and so forth) and use packet-level filtering to block traffic from untrusted hosts or networks.

3. Load Balancers:
Use load balancers to distribute overall load on your Web or application servers, or to distribute demand according to the kind of task to be performed. A load balancing solution is able to read headers and contents of incoming packets. This enables you to balance load by the kind of information within the packet, including the user and the type of request. A load balancing solution that reads packet headers enables you to identify privileged users and to direct requests to servers handling specific tasks.

4. Storage Area Networks (SANs):
Understanding the data requirements of the storage system is necessary for a successful deployment. Increasingly, SANs are being deployed so that the storage is independent of the servers used in conjunction with it. Deploying SANs can represent a decrease in the time to recover from a non-functional server as the machine can be replaced without having to relocate the storage drives.

5. Domain Name System (DNS):
Servers which make heavy usage of DNS queries should be equipped with a local caching DNS server to reduce lookup latency as well as network traffic.

Challenges Surrounding Network Infrastructure:

Top challenges:
1. Centralising traffic
2. Dealing with duplicate data
3. Sending the right data to the right tool
4. Network Security

Centralising traffic: Within an organisation, there’s often different subnets, locations or sites, without a centralised hub, network visibility, monitoring and management will become impossible. To tackle problem statement, organisations use network infrastructure solutions to centralise traffic to better understand and monitor the data traversing their networks.

Dealing with Duplicate Data: In some cases, duplicate data can comprise 40 – 50 percent of network traffic. Either this duplication happens due to unbalanced traffic flow or by the failure of protocol handshake. This can’t be observed on fast network which is connecting the world at high bandwidth, it can be observed over slow networks of at slowest traffic flow.

Sending the Right Data to the Right Tool: When we connect to a network, we can see other devices connected over same subnet, by the help of some tool, For example, computer A trying to send a packet to computer B with broadcast message , and C,D,E are also connected to the same network. These systems will get unknown packet, to restrict this need to use some pre configured and tested tool to send the right data to the right host.

Network Security: Network security is a subset of cyber Security, It’s the act of protecting files and directories in a network of computers against misuse, hacking and unauthorised access. It’s all about protecting the organisation’s IT infrastructure from online threats.

Most important, ID and password, internet access, firewall, backup, encryptions come under network security. Whereas Network protection, application up to date information come under cyber security.

Network Infrastructure Is the Most Important Component of IT Infrastructure:

It’s important to have a reliable IT infrastructure and also qualified people, but neither of those are sufficient without a well-built network infrastructure. A network infrastructure enables connection and communication, each of which are critical to the success of a business.