Advantages and disadvantages of WAN

Advantages and disadvantages of WAN Assumption. The company consist of 4 buildings, one as headquarter which located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and three as branches which located in Jakarta Indonesia, Bangkok Thailand and Manila Filipina. The company consists of 4 departments that are admin staff, IT department, marketing department and human resources department, which have total 40 employees in every office. Each department has 10 employees, which mean every departments room consist of 10 personal computers. LAN architecture will be the same between headquarter and branches. Every building Consist of 3 floors, 1st floors for administrator staff and human resources staff, 2nd floor for IT department and server room and the 3rd floor for marketing and meeting room. Every department has its own peripherals such as printer, scanner, and Photostat machine. Projector will be in meeting room. Have connection to the Internet and connection to each office. Headquarter office has external backup which located in Malaysia nearby headquarter office approximately 2 km, its provide backup for the database. Problem identification. The company does not have network yet. The company does not have DBMS (Database Management System). The company does not have backup yet. Security issues. WAN explanation. There are five sites in the WAN diagram, consist of headquarter office which is located in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, three branches offices which is located in Thailand Filipina and Indonesia and one external backup which is located nearby headquarter office. The function of external backup is to keep the data as the original data. WAN topology. Basically WAN topology is almost similar with the LAN topology consist of point-to-point topology, ring topology and star topology. There are several advantages and disadvantages for every topology. The advantages and disadvantages of each topology will be shown in table bellow. For this company we suggest to use star topology because it is more s calable, provides shorter data paths between two sites and easy to add new nodes, if someday the company will expand the business by adding new branches in the other country it will easy to add to the existing WAN, the disadvantages of star topology is it has single point of failure at the concentrator routers. To overcome this problem network administrator tend to add some alternatives links between sites. WAN transmission technology. For WAN technologies we will do comparison between three technologies that are leased line, frame relay, X.25 and PPP. For WAN technologies we suggest to use frame relay because it can provide performance similar with the lease line with significantly less cost over long distance. Another reason is reduce internetworking cost because with frame relay required fewer port to access other network, increase performance with reduce complexity and definitely it is cheaper than leased line. Lower cost over long distance makes frame relay is good for this com pany because the branches office located across the country. Technology. For WAN technology we suggest to use VPN (virtual private network). VPN is alternatives technology to replace the more expensive WAN technology. The advantages of VPN that available online on: (http://www.universitydissertations.com/Communications/using-VPN.php) are, provide well security method, less expensive when compare with the WAN technology, reduce setup times, fast network link, simple network topology and productivity improved due to less constraints when compared with other networking methods. And the disadvantage of VPN is limited security for wireless users.