Employee Role Count Onsite$/$Remote PC$/$Tablet$/$Smartphone

Executives $(4)$ Onsite Yes No Yes

Office Manager $(1)$ Onsite Yes Yes Yes

Advertising Manager $(1)25/75$ Yes Yes Yes

Public Relations and Social Media Manager $(1)$ Remote Yes No Yes

Human Resources Manager $(1)$ and Specialist $(1)$ Onsite Yes No Yes

Receptionists $(2)$ Onsite No Yes No

Leasing Manager $(1)90/10$ Yes Yes Yes

Leasing Agents $(10)50/50$ No Yes Yes

Leasing Assistants $(2)$ Onsite Yes No No

Property Owner Liaisons $(3)50/50$ Yes Yes Yes

Property Managers $(4)50/50$ Yes Yes Yes

Maintenance Manager $(1)80/20$ Yes Yes Yes

Maintenance Specialists $(8)10/90$ No Yes Yes

Accountant $(1)$ Onsite Yes No Yes

Accounting Specialists $(3)$ Onsite Yes No No

IT Manager $(1)$ and IT Support Specialist $(1)$ Onsite Yes No Yes

While the budget is not unlimited, the top executives feel that it is more important to have good$-$quality, reliable, easy$-$to$-$use hardware and software than to keep costs as low as possible.

Ease of administration is important because the company$$s IT staff has limited experience with network administration.

The following capabilities are required:

The network must authenticate users and authorize them for the privileges they need to do their work.

All employees must be able to access shared resources, including files and printers, from anywhere.

All employees must be able to access the company$$s custom$-$built property management app from anywhere.

Certain employees need access to specific secure databases.

The network must be very secure$.$ Top executives are especially concerned about ransomware and breaches of private information such as credit card data.

The company is open to either hosting servers on$-$site or on the cloud, or a combination of the two.

Some of these roles are already filled by existing workers from the two companies; other positions will be filled by new hires.

In addition to the client hosts, there are about a dozen network$-$capable multifunction printers that the merging companies are bringing with them. Each of them currently uses a static IPv$4$ address and is part of a workgroup. Given that you are replacing the workgroups with a client$/$server network, consider how you will deploy those printers.

For this scenario, assume that you$$ll be using the IP address range $10\mathrm{.}1\mathrm{.}1\mathrm{.}0/24$ for the internal network. The following are different ways to consider what subnets you want to create, depending on how you think you will be managing them.

Based on geographic factors: In a multi$-$office company, you might create a separate subnet for each location. Or in a multistory building, each floor might be a subnet.

By departments: You might create a separate subnet for each department, especially if certain departments have access to specific applications or databases that other departments don$$t have.

By functions or permissions: It can be easier to assign resources and permissions to an entire subnet than to individual users or groups. You might have one subnet for all PCs that connect to the network via cables, another for user devices connected through Wi$-$Fi$,$ a third one for network$-$connected equipment such as printers, and so on$.$

Although it can be tempting to create subnets that are exactly the right size for the pool of users it will be supporting, that is short$-$sighted. As a general rule, when defining subnets, you should plan for a future expansion of at least $50\%.$ For example, suppose a certain subnet must initially support $10$ host IP addresses. Rather than using a subnet mask of $255\mathrm{.}255\mathrm{.}255\mathrm{.}240,$ resulting in $14$ available host IP addresses, you would be better served to go up one level, to a subnet mask of $255\mathrm{.}255\mathrm{.}255\mathrm{.}224,$ which supports up to $30$ host IP addresses.

How do you plan to segment the network$\mathrm{.}1?$ Explain your strategy, and list the subnets you would create.

Looking at the scenario document, how many subnets do you think you will need, and how many hosts must each of them support?

Given the needed numbers of hosts that each subnet will support, what subnet masks should be used for each of them? For each subnet, state the number of mask bits $($for example, $/27)$ and the subnet mask to use $($for example, $255\mathrm{.}255\mathrm{.}255\mathrm{.}224).$ You may find it useful to use a subnetting calculator, such as this calculator. $($Ref: IP Subnetting$)$

Do you think it would be useful to implement VLANs in the proposed network? Why or why not? $($Ref: Virtual LANs$)$