Constructing The Network Security Platform Of A Manufacturing Enterprise

The 21st century is an information era with network as a platform, and extensive uses of computer networks in the society have brought a major impact to our daily lives. Besides large enterprises, modern small and medium enterprises also have begun extensive use of information technology tools to enhance their competitiveness. Information technology can improve the operational efficiencies of small and medium-sized enterprises, so that they can grow faster. However, when adopting the information technology, small and medium enterprises also face with large enterprises the same problem—losses due to weak information security. Although the information systems of small and medium enterprises are much smaller than that of large enterprises, but the security threats are of equal importance for all these enterprises regardless of their sizes. Since most of small and medium enterprises have very limited resources, how to construct a general-purpose network information security platform specific for small and medium enterprises is practically valuable.Our company is a medium-size manufacturing enterprise, where various tasks as a whole need the exchange integration of a variety of data information. Therefore, the construction of the company's information network is critical for the company's productivity. As a guard-line, the construction of an information network must take into account a balanced combination of various factors, i.e. functionality, usability, compatibility, security, scalability and etc.This paper presents the constructing of our secure medium-size enterprise network, including the selection of related network technologies and products. With references to the related network design schemes, we approached a solution that based on the combination of switching and routing network mode. Specifically, the whole network design is composed of three levels, i.e. the core, convergence and access layers. In this network, the geographically separate segments are connected through the core layer. In addition, Cisco switches and ISA Server gateways are used to build the company intranet, resulting in a cost-effective and upgradeable network. A suite of protocols are also employed to prevent the network from route loops, which in turn allows the network's access equipments to quickly enter the relay state for fast and reliable data transfer.