Network Structure and Architecture

Network Structure and Architecture
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Introduction
The advancement in technology has enabled most business organisations to embrace the use of information and communication technology in promoting their business activities. Network structures have become a major practice in computer networking for most small business enterprises. Network structure involves the designing and use of a communication network in a business organisation. The communication network in a business organisation takes different architectures and topologies. However, smaller business enterprises do not have a straightforward network structure and architecture to enable it provide secure communication and data transfer. In most cases, smaller firms have moderate requirements in terms of computer networking. Although smaller organisations have fewer computers. The network structure and architecture should be able to allow secure storage, sharing, and retrieval of data (Breeding, 2013). The commonly used network architecture for smaller business organisations are peer to peer and client-server networks. This essay explains the peer-to-peer network architecture for smaller organisations and ways of securing and maintaining the network. In addition, the essay also focuses on the sociotechnical aspects.
Peer-To-Peer Network
Peer to peer network involves sharing of network by computers that are connected together. Peer to peer network is mostly used in domestic workgroups that involves dozens of computers and other machines such printers and scanners. Peer to peer network is commonly found and used in areas that are local networked, mostly home networking. In peer-to-peer network there is the aspect of data processing, which is shared by all computers. This means that it is the responsibility of all connected computers in the network to process data. Failure of one computer may interrupt the processing and sharing of data. The computers in this network run on a similar protocol and software that involves putting all the computers adjacent to each other. However, some peer networks utilize the internet in sharing information between one-computer devices to the other. The pee networks can either be structured or unstructured networks. In unstructured peer-to-peer networks, there is not particular structure that is imposed in the overlay design network. Instead, there are nodes which arte randomly connected to each other. The unstructured networks are mostly built to allow optimization of different regional overlay. In structured peer-to-peer networks, the different overlays of the network are organised in topologies and use a specific protocol to ensure that the nodes are working efficiently. The peer-to-peer network is convenient for smaller offices in that they allow the sharing of information files, printers and other computer based resources in all directions and allows the distribution of workload among the connected computers.
Securing and Maintaining Peer Networks
The security of any organisation is important in any network to avoid malicious behaviours by competitors and hackers. This is because most organisations may have something, which is important for other organisations. This means that the access to organisation information should be restricted to the employees of the organisation by the use of a security information policy. The security information policy provides the standards and guidelines for securing, sharing, and access of information on the peer network. Therefore, per to peer network is faced with a number of security issues such as privacy and identity of shared information, poisoning of the network, fairness in sharing information, hacking and physical access to network servers. Hence, to ensure security of the network a number of procedures need to be considered (Paquet, 2013).
Perimeter security: this is where the peer-to-peer network is protected by using applications that prevent the attack of the network by ...