Tamirat Atsemegiorgis Building a Secure Local Area Network

 

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Discussion and Conclusions 
At the present time, 
company’s owners and network administrators are engaged in 
protecting their resources and assets by prioritizing the deployment of security 
measures before offering any kind of network-based services. To build a secure net-
work system, a network administrator needs to select the right kind of technology that 
fit with the 
company’s goal and security demands. The purpose of this project were to 
study the susceptibility of small company network system and build a secure Local Ar-
ea Network system in the laboratory and recommend the best practice presented to-
day. 
An attack to a computer system might happen at any time from anywhere and hence 
securing a computer and a network system of a company is left without choice. Build-
ing a security layer on a network system of a company costs money and time, but it is 
worth it, considering the losses and damages occurring without it. Protection of a com-
pany’s network assets require developing a security plan and policy that decide what 
needs to be protected and from whom and then implementing the right security 
measures to stop the losses. The system needs to be monitored continuously for the 
threat and attacks coming from the inside and outside a network system targeting the 
company’s resources of any kind. 
This stu
dy found out that no company’s network system is immune from an attack and 
identified the source of the vulnerabilities of the system to be lack of security policy, 
and configuration and technology weakness. In order to avoid the occurrences of such 
problems on a small 
company’s network system, a demonstration of the basic network 
devices configuration, layer 2 and 3 security features implementation, firewall deploy-
ment, wireless data encryption, secure wireless access for company users through a 
VPN connection and remote client VPN connection implementation were deployed on a 
simulated Local Area Network in the test network. The security system built was tested 
and found to be working very well and security-tight 
to protect a small company’s net-
work system and resource from internal and external attacks. 
As the network grows in size a user authentication at the local database is not efficient 
and here by, I recommend to anyone who is interested in studying the subject further in 
the future to enhance the security system of the project by incorporating RADUS-based 
authentication and explore advance encryption methods for wireless network.

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