Network Planning and Implementation: Contoso Corporation Case Study

This case study analyzes Contoso Corporation's plan to redesign Adatum's network infrastructure using an automated server installation plan. The proposed hierarchical network aims to reduce operational costs, proactively maintain the network, enhance security, and ensure high network availability. The solution involves a three-layer hierarchical network design (core, distribution, and access layers) and modular design based on Cisco Enterprise Architectures. The project follows a five-phase methodology: initiation, planning, execution, testing, and closure. The goal is to provide a secure, efficient, and scalable network infrastructure that supports Adatum's business growth. Desklib provides access to similar case studies and solved assignments for students.

Running head: PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTING
PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTING: A Case Study of Contoso Corporation
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

1PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTING
Executive Summary
The aim of this report is to propose a new network infrastructure for Adatum. The importance
of network infrastructure has become an issue because the only aim of the organisation in the
recent time is to increase the productivity of the organisation. This is because there has been
an increase of competition in the market in different sectors and that the only means to
combat against these is to rebuild the network infrastructure. The report proposes a
networking infrastructure which will enhance business growth of Adatum.

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Purpose of the Project................................................................................................................3
Requirements of the Project:......................................................................................................4
Proposed Solution......................................................................................................................5
Hierarchical Network.............................................................................................................5
Modular Design provided by Cisco Enterprise Architectures.............................................11
Methodology:.......................................................................................................................12
Conclusion................................................................................................................................14

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Introduction
Contoso Corporation is the leading producer of the smart devices used for home
purposes. They nearly completed one of their products which is centralized on servers and
fetch data from the wireless nodes present in the houses or may be from the worn devices.
The company needs hundred of servers to rollout the product. The manager of the company
wished to generate a solution which will generate hundred of servers monthly for the
company to influence the business growth. The investors of the organization decided to
acquire another organization Adatum headquartered in Melbourne. It consists of three great
sites and each site comprises of 500 to 1000 users. The report mainly focuses on redesigning
the network infrastructure of the organization. The report briefly describes the purpose of the
project, requirements of the project and finally it delivers a solution to the Contoso
corporation to deliver a secure and developed network infrastructure in Adatum.
Purpose of the Project
The purpose of the project is to generate an automated server installation plan for
Contoso corporation to redesign the network infrastructure of Adatum. It will be benefitable
for the organization in many ways like
 It will help in controlling the operational cost of the entire IT network (Yi et al.,
2014): Adatum can reduce its total operational cost by controlling the maintenance,
service, software, infrastructure and hardware costs. As this is a form of fixed cost
expense the operational cost is almost reduced and predictable. Thus, it can provide
business growth for the organization by increasing the productivity of the
organization and allow the business officials to estimate the overall cost of the
production.

4PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTING
 Issue prevention and active network maintenance: It allows the business officials to
concentrate on the business operations rather focusing on the irrelevant methods.
Contoso will implement a high-quality network infrastructure which will increase
and develop the production rate of the organization. Proactive and security checks is
to be carried out frequently to avoid any kind of disrupt in the network infrastructure
(Kim & Feamster, 2013).
 Security: Advance network infrastructure provided by Contoso are secure enough
and block the attacker to enter in the network layer. Many organizations prevent
themselves by implementing different technologies for each and every malware
attack. MaxSecure will be used in Adatum to secure every node of the network
infrastructure. It blocks an attacker and disallow him or her to enter in the network
infrastructure to spread the malware. Malware can impact highly in every
organization (Guo, Cheng & Kelley, 2016). Thus, Adatum was recommended to
focus on the malware and their counter measures after the implementation of the
secured network infrastructure.
 High network availability: Network availability is the primary key for every business
operation. High network availability boosts the business operation to enhance the
business growth and run the business operation smoothly. It allows Adatum to
improve the voice quality, call routing and network management. Advanced network
infrastructure prevents the organization from traffic that are introduced by some
attacker.
Requirements of the Project:
The official heads of the Contoso Corporation decided to produce hundred servers
monthly which uses the windows Internal database. The Contoso decided to redesign the
network infrastructure of the Adatum using some advanced and developed automated server

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installation plan. The network requirements of the proposed network infrastructure are as
follows-
 The proposed network should be installed with some countermeasures so that it can
handle some failure or disruption in the network layer.
 The network should provide instant delivery from one host to another host. It should
response to the input as fast as possible and should deliver a proper output to the other
host (Lu et al., 2013)
 The proposed network should be secured. It should protect all the data and will guard
them from any leakage. The data should be kept back up so that in case of any failure
the data can be restored to the organization system.
 The network infrastructure should be easily modifying according to any updates. The
performance of the network infrastructure increases by the proper and regular
maintenance of the infrastructure.
 The layout should identify and fix the issues that aroused in the network
infrastructure. It should be easier for the network officials to identify the failure
occurred in the network layout (Filsfils et al, 2015).
Proposed Solution
Hierarchical Network
The Network requirements can be meet by implementing the hierarchical network
design that will be used to organize devices in multiple domain or networks. The hierarchical
network comprises of three layers (Jan et al., 2015):
Core layer: Connects the devices of distribution layer.
Distribution layer: Interconnects smaller local networks

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Access layer: Gives Connectivity to the network hosts as well as to the end devices.
Flat network will be divided into smaller groups or manageable hierarchical blocks to
make the traffic local. Devices in the flat network does not allow the user to handle the
broadcasts or to block the undesirable traffic in the network. When more device or
applications are added to this type of network the response time becomes low and it
consumes high time to transfer the output from one host to other.
Figure 1: Flat Network
(Source: Layout 1, 2019)

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Figure 2: Hierarchical network
(Source: Layout 1, 2019)
Core Layer
The switches and the routers in this layer give high speed connectivity. In an
organization the core layer can connect multiple buildings and also give connectivity to
server farm. The core layer consists of VPN, extranet, WAN. It enhances the network
development (Li & Pan, 2013). The technologies in the core layer are high speed, aggregate
links, enhancing routing protocols and load balancing.

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Figure 3: Core design
(Source: Layout 1, 2019)
Mesh topology
The core layers are wired by mesh topology. The wiring process can be done in two
different methods namely, partial mesh and full mesh. In Full mesh wiring system every tools
are connected with each other which provides redundancy and it is a complex process and
consumes high cost (Neishaburi & Zilic, 2013). In the partial mesh topology one device can
be connected with two other devices which provides sufficient redundancy. It reduces the
complexity of the wiring system.

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Figure 4: Mesh topology
(Source: Layout 1, 2019)
Distribution layer
This layer deals with filtering, communication point and filtering between the access
layer and the core layer. The main functions of this layer are filtering as well as handling the
traffic flows, summarizing the routes before the advertisement of the routes to Core,
Enforcing the access control policy and isolating core from the access layer disruptions (Liu
et al., 2017).

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Figure 5: Distribution Layer
(Source: Layout 1, 2019)
Access layer
It is utilized to handle user access regarding the internetwork resources. Network
designer facilitate traffic that is produced from access layer. The end devices are connected
here. The access layer resides in the campus building, server farm and at the edge of the
company (Du, Wang & Wang, 2015).

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Figure 6: Access Layer
(Source: Layout 1, 2019)
Modular Design provided by Cisco Enterprise Architectures
Three-layer hierarchical design will be further divided in modules. Each module
defines various logical or physical connectivity. These modules enhance the flexibility of the
network design (Sood, 2014). Three areas of the modular network design are:
Enterprise Campus: This particular area comprises of the network elements that are
required for the independent operation in a unit campus. It consists of building distribution,
building access and campus core.

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Server farm: A server farm prevents server resources as well as gives reliable and redundant
high speed connectivity.
Enterprise Edge: When a traffic enters in the campus network this area blocks the traffic
from external resources and directs it to the enterprise network. It comprises of elements that
are required for the efficient communication between remote locations and enterprise campus
(Chorafas, 2016).
Figure 7: Cisco Enterprise Architecture
(Source: Layout 1, 2019)
Methodology:
The proposed network infrastructure will be carried out before analysing some criteria
like Identification of the network requirements, characterize existing system and Designing
the network topology and its solution.

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The project will be completed in five different phases:
 Project initiation: In this phase Contoso develops the business scenario of Adatum
which analyses the present business scenario, business opportunities and problems,
the cost and advantages of each alternative solution. Feasibility study will be carried
out to determine that the proposed architecture will be able to solve the issue for
Adatum (Harrison & Lock, 2017). The Project department will establish project
charter which comprises of employment of people and assigning them in different
roles and responsibilities. The later phases of the project life cycle will also be
reviewed by the project heads and will be discussed with the employees too.
 Project Planning: In this phase the project members will deveop a project pan which
consists of the phases, activities and the time frame required to complete the project.
Then they will establish other plans like resource plan, quality plan, acceptance plan,
procurement plan, communication plan, risk plan and financial plan. In this phase the
impact of the project on every factors of the organization will be analysed.
 Project execution: This particular phase deals with building the deliverables of the
project. This phase handles or perform different management methods like
Procurement management, Quality management, issue management, Risk
management, Change management, Cost management, Time management and so on.
Basically, in this phase the final project is executed (Heldman, 2018).
 Project Testing: The proposed network will be tested by the quality control team of
Contoso and the is the product is found to be free from error then it will be finally
implemented in Adatum. Each and every variable of the network infrastructure will be
examined and revised thoroughly before the final implementation phase. Various
countermeasure will be prepared to prevent any vulnerable attack in the infrastructure
which can negatively impact Adatum.

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 Project Closure: Based on the results of the testing phase the project manager will
approve the network and then it will be implemented in the organization (Heagney,
2016).
Conclusion
Therefore, it can be concluded that redesigning the network infrastructure of Adatum
using Automated server installation plan is an effective and efficient decision taken by the
organizational heads. The Contoso thus prepared a proposal on implanting a new network
infrastructure for Adatum which will enhance the business growth and will make the business
flow smooth. It also help Adatum to control the operational cost by implementing the
proposed network infrastructure. It also provides security to the company by blocking the
attacker’s interference in the network layer. The project will be completed according to the
methodology and the final product will be tested by the control quality team of Contoso and
after the approval of the product it will be implemented in Adatum.

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References
Chorafas, D. N. (2016). Enterprise architecture and new generation information systems.
CRC Press.
Du, Y., Wang, W., & Wang, L. (2015). Hierarchical recurrent neural network for skeleton
based action recognition. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and
pattern recognition (pp. 1110-1118).
Filsfils, C., Nainar, N. K., Pignataro, C., Cardona, J. C., & Francois, P. (2015, December).
The segment routing architecture. In 2015 IEEE Global Communications Conference
(GLOBECOM) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
Guo, H., Cheng, H. K., & Kelley, K. (2016). Impact of network structure on malware
propagation: a growth curve perspective. Journal of Management Information Systems,
33(1), 296-325.
Harrison, F., & Lock, D. (2017). Advanced project management: a structured approach.
Routledge.
Heagney, J. (2016). Fundamentals of project management. Amacom.
Heldman, K. (2018). PMP: project management professional exam study guide. John Wiley
& Sons.
Jan, M. A., Nanda, P., He, X., & Liu, R. P. (2015, August). A sybil attack detection scheme
for a centralized clustering-based hierarchical network. In 2015 IEEE
Trustcom/BigDataSE/ISPA (Vol. 1, pp. 318-325). IEEE.
Kim, H., & Feamster, N. (2013). Improving network management with software defined
networking. IEEE Communications Magazine, 51(2), 114-119.

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Layout 1. (2019). Layout 1 [Ebook] (p. 48). scte.
Li, Y., & Pan, D. (2013, June). OpenFlow based load balancing for fat-tree networks with
multipath support. In Proc. 12th IEEE International Conference on Communications
(ICC’13), Budapest, Hungary (pp. 1-5).
Liu, X. K., Wang, Y. W., Xiao, J. W., & Yang, W. (2017). Distributed hierarchical control
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Lu, H., Arora, N., Zhang, H., Lumezanu, C., Rhee, J., & Jiang, G. (2013, December). Hybnet:
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Neishaburi, M. H., & Zilic, Z. (2013). A fault tolerant hierarchical network on chip router
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Yi, X., Liu, F., Liu, J., & Jin, H. (2014). Building a network highway for big data:
architecture and challenges. IEEE Network, 28(4), 5-13.

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List of Appendices
Figure 1: Flat Network
Figure 2: Hierarchical network
Figure 3: Core design
Figure 4: Mesh Topology
Figure 5: Distribution layer
Figure 6: Access layer
Figure 7: Cisco enterprise architecture