Warner & Harper is a tax accounting firm located in Columbus, Ohio. David Warner and Glenn Harper have been together since 1989, and between the two of them they have 27 years of accounting and tax experience.

OFFICE NETWORK AND SYSTEM UPGRADES

Technologies Used:

Windows 2000 Professional Windows NT4 Workstation Watchguard Technologies Firebox SOHO

Their Needs:

The desktop systems at Warner & Harper were very unreliable due to the fact that the operating systems they were using were made for home use instead of business use. They had a mix of Windows 95 and Windows 98 throughout the office. Several of the software packages that were used at Warner & Harper would crash often, many times forcing a reboot of the entire desktop in order to recover. This caused the office staff to not be as productive as they could. Additionally, Warner & Harper had a broadband network link to the Internet which was ran into one of the desktops used by the office staff. A Microsoft proxy software package was used to allow the rest of the office to share the broadband internet connection. This led to many problems since the desktop was used by one of the office staff as their main desktop computer. Anytime the system crashed, for whatever reason, the entire internet connection became unavailable. Additionally, there was no firewall protecting the office network from the internet. Warner & Harper was in desparate need of a secure connection to the internet that would protect their internal network, as well as getting the broadband network link connected to a dedicated device of some sort instead of a staff desktop computer. Lastly, the core files which were shared between the members of the staff were being shared out from one of the staff's desktop computers as well. This caused an increase load on desktop that was doing the sharing of the filesystem, which would impact the work of the staff member using that system.

Our Solution:

IDDG proposed upgrading all of the office desktop computers to Windows 2000 Professional. The suggested upgrade would offer several benefits. One of them is the fact that Windows 2000 isolates application programs from the operating system kernel. If an application were to crash, it would not take the operating system out with it. This means that in the event of an application crash, the only thing that the staff would have to do would be to restart the application. A reboot of the entire system would not be needed. Another benefit is the ability to secure the desktops against intruders. Since Windows 2000 Professional requires a username and password in order to log into the system Warner & Harper was able to lock down the desktops and prevent unauthorized access by intruders or other staff members. IDDG also proposed purchasing a dedicated fileserver which would be used for sharing files between the staff members. This put the processing load onto a dedicated machine and got it off of a staff desktop, thus freeing that desktop up for more important tasks. The file server houses all client-related information, and is backed up on a daily basis using a tape-drive back-up solution. Lastly, IDDG installed a Watchguard Technologies Firebox SOHO firewall in their network and relocated the broadband internet connection onto the firewall. This, as well, offered several benefits. The firewall uses Name Address Translation (NAT) to give Internet access to the office, instead of using proxy software. It also blocks external access to the internal network, thus preventing hackers from viewing private data. Another benefit is the fact that the broadband internet connection no longer depends upon a desktop computer being up for the rest of the office to use it. Since the firewall has no internal moving parts it has a much greater mean time between failure, which means the chance of the internet connection being down due to a hardware failure is minimized.