| Links | Related Topics |
|---|---|
Overview
The PC has become the standard tool for all office workers and even small companies want to connect their PC's to have access to data residing on another computer. This is easier and much more convenient than exchanging floppies or sending documents by mail to the person sitting next to you.
As a company grows other considerations like access control, data integrity, PC maintenance and desaster recovery measures become more important.
First Choice Internet has over 15 years experience in PC's, Network Design and Network Support. For well over 10 years we have been working with Japanese PC and Unix/Linux computers.
Peer-to-Peer Networks
Peer-to-Peer networks are the most basic form of a network. It means that 2 or more PC's are connected using a LAN cable and a router or hub. In this setup no server is required. You can now share data on your harddisk with other network members. In practise this means that your co-worker has access to some directories on your harddisk and you may have access to parts of his harddisk.
While such a network is one step better than no network company data is still stored on several computers and it is not easy to distinguish between programs, company data and private data.
As the number of PC's increases this problem becomes more serious.
File Server Networks
Once a company has more than ca 10 people it is well advised to set up a central data store.
In most cases a file server for all company data is the most flexible solution. It is then possible to build a domain based network. Here all user and access information is stored on the server which makes administration much easier.
Such networks can be build either with a Windows Server or with a Linux Server (hybrid network consisting of Linux server and Windows client PC's). For a Linux server you don't need to pay license fee and thus this is the cheaper alternative.
First Choice Internet has extensive experience in setting up networks with Windows and Linux servers. Please ask us for a quotation if you should need a new server.
VPN Networks
Many companies have regional offices. If you can give staff in a regional or remote office access to your head office' data you can reduce the mail traffic required to exchange documents between the different locations. Using VPN (Virtual Private Network) routers it is possible to secure networks using public Internet connection lines. This has 3 main advantages:
- Company staff can access data in other offices in the same way as data on their own server
- Executives and/or sales staff can have access to the company data from home or from a hotel
- A service company can use this connection for maintenance and trouble shooting work. This is faster and less expensive (no travel involved)
First Choice Internet can set up a VPN for you. We are also offering a TheGreenBow VPN Client. This PC software makes it very easy to connect your PC to your companies Local Area Network (LAN). You can download the VPN Client free of charge and test it for 30 days.
Data Security
Data Security comprises a whole bundle of measures and as the legal requirements (J-Sox) are becoming more demanding companies are obliged to the rules and to invest in hardware, software and training. The must important data security requirements are:
1. Identification of important data
Not all data is equally important. First step is to physically separate company data from PC system data, personal data and other unrelated data. All company data should be put into a separate data store be it a special hard disk or some other storage device.
One weak point is email data which in most companies is downloaded to the individual PC's, accumulated over years without any sort of archive. This makes it difficult to find a particular information years later - in particular if the person in charge at the time has left the company!
2. Data access control
Depending on the number of employees you need to restrict data access by area. For instance, nobody should have access to Personell or Accounting data but the staff working in those departments. Sales staff should only have access to sales function like making quotations etc. This means that access profiles need to be established and maintained.
Access Control also includes administrative measure ensuring that important company data is not leaked or stolen.
3. Ensuring data integrity
This means to take measure to ensure that data is complete and correct.
PC's do crash - sometimes - and this may mean that you can't recover the data from that particular harddisk. If you don't have a backup you may suffer loss of imortant data.
Therefore you must ensure that you have a backup of all important data! As it is difficult - although possible - to make automatiac backups from Windows clients to a network server it is preferable to store important data on a server then giving authorized persons the access required.
Data in databases or on harddisks may become corrupt and unreadable. To prevent this you should regularly program to check your filesystems e.g. defrag for Windows machines.
You are well advised to use Raid systems for your main company data store. This gives you a much higher protection against hard disk failures!
In addition it is necessary to establish working backups and data restore policies. It is also not sufficient if the backup is working but the data restore process fails when you urgently need it!
4. Desaster recovery
Listening to the News we sometimes hear about terrible natural catastrophes like thunderstorms and floods destroying whole cities; people loosing all their property.
You need to ask youself: if by whatever means the office gets completely destroyed will the company loose all its data and be finished? Because it is a fact that most companies experience such a desaster go out of business one year after the event.
A viable protection against such an event is a off-site backup.
This means that a copy of your data is stored at a different physical location. In the past companies would take their backup tapes to the local bank, storing them in the strong room. Due to growing volumes and the fact that tape backups are not in favour anymore because the write speed of tapes is very slow compared with harddisks it is more viable to store backups on harddisk. Given the current network speed (in particular in Japan) backups to a remote datacenter are a viable option. This can be automated and nobody has to go to the bank anymore. Please not that First Choice Internet is offering very affordable Net Backup and Storage Services.
(1267 total words in this text) (2759 Reads)
