Windows Server Security Case Study Discussion Responses
Programming
A minimum of 200 words is required for each discussion question, and they must be your own words. Including figures and quotes is value-added, but they will not count against your 200 word requirement. Be sure to examine the discussion grading rubric.
Discussion Question 1:
Describe how to deploy a website and make it as secure as possible while reducing its resources used.
Discussion Question 2:
You are the administrator for the contoso.com site. Recently, the server hosting the corporate websites had a failure that caused the server to go down for a short period of time while the server was being fixed. In the future, you need to take steps to avoid any hardware failure that would cause the websites to go down. Describe your recommended course of action. Would clustering be an option here? Why or why not?
Respond to the following responses with one paragraph each in your own words.
Response 1:
If tasked to deploy a website, with security and limiting resource usage being top priorities, I’d suggest utilizing a Hyper-V container with a port-mapping configured to allow direct access to the website. According to Microsoft, “multiple container instances can run concurrently on one host, however, each container runs inside of a special virtual machine. This provides kernel level isolation between each Hyper-V container and container host” (Microsoft, 2018). This isolation between the container running our website and the container host (server) provides us with a high degree of security inherent with the container model. The containers are highly mobile and easily cloned or copied, making it simple to move about the network if needed. When selecting a container-based solution, we have the ability to place our networking mode as transparent. This mode makes the virtual networking stack “transparent” and allows the container to have direct access to the physical network, providing it has received IP information via DHCP or statically. This mode would be ok for most cases, but since security is a top priority, we can configure the networking mode as Network Address Translation (NAT) and only allow communication with this container through ports of our choosing. In this instance, we’d allow port 80 (HTTP) and possibly 443 (HTTPS) based on the website’s configuration. By only allowing 2 ports for external communication we increase our security posture significantly.
Response 2:
Failover clustering will increase the web server’s availability and provide fault tolerance. Failover clustering will reduce the point of failure that can occur if one of the web servers fail. With just clustering point of failures can occur if the servers or services goes offline or is overwhelmed with requests. With fail over clustering resources will remain even if point of failures occurs because they are all configured to share the same storage device. Therefor if one of the servers experience a hard drive failure, or power issue, etc., it can be taken offline without impacting the availability of the failover cluster because the website information is not on the server but on an external storage device. With NLB each server holds its own separate storage information thus if the server fails it can no longer be synchronized with the other servers. Having an external shared storage device can prove to be more favorable for failover and redundancy purposed.
