Internet Bank

Imagine you work for a start-up company that is launching an internet bank. The internet bank will provide the following financial products and services to its customers:

• Accounts and deposits
• Credit, debit, and travel cards
• Loans
• Insurance
• Investments
• Tax services

Senior management and investors have identified the following key technical factors for the success of the internet bank:

• Scalability: The technology and software application infrastructure must accommodate high growth and new users without impacting the service levels delivered to existing users.
• Availability: Users must be supported with robust, consistent, and reliable access; excellent performance 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• Security: Industry-accepted security practices and a multi-level authentication system have to be put in place to authenticate and identify each user before they access their accounts and initiate transactions.
• Manageability: The technology and software applications infrastructure must be easy to manage, support, and update.

You have been assigned to analyze your organization and develop a technical architecture to support the business processes of this internet bank.

Write one hundred and fifty word response about which resource(s) you found to be most useful in terms of not only researching the different types of networks that exist, but which might be best for a given scenario. What criteria are you using, or thinking of using, to determine which type of network is most appropriate for your particular project?