This requires a bit of backstory. When I was working with Candia Holdings, we purchased a property out of receivership. The building was barely occupied and the internet was supplied to the tenants by a router supplied by the ISP. Needless to say, this was unsustainable. We needed to upgrade our infrastructure from the ground up. Having just started the company, I had more knowledge than the typical person but far from what was required to be able to implement this overhaul. I knew that there were going to be challenges and I set forth on designing a plan.

Challenges

• Logically separating tenants from the company's digital assets
• Securing from outside threats
• Securing from internal threats
• WiFi Availability

We secured the help of a local IT company that is now defunct, and the network engineer who implemented the system became a role model for me. Through conversations with him I understood more and more of what was involved in the project.

1. Selecting the Hardware: We decided that a Watchguard Firewall and HP Enterprise Switches would be the best course for both budget and effectiveness.
2. The Deployment: Early on a Saturday morning I met the team on site and we began to provision and deploy 11 switches, a new firewall, and our new domain server. I worked closely with the team ensuring that the project went smoothly and we prepared for the switchover.
3. The Implementation: Late that night, once all the tenants had left for the day we began the tedious task of switching all the patch cables from the old unmanaged switches to our new managed switchs.
4. Security: At the time, we felt that the security provided by the firewall would be sufficient for external threats. However, the possibility of internal threats was too great to leave up to chance. Our security posture was to separate each floor logically into vLANs.
5. WiFi Implementation: Once the hardwire network was built, we added WiFi to the deployment. Each hotspot was configured to allow access to a Tenant network, a guest network and a network for our company.

Overseeing this project gave me a taste of the daily life of a network engineer and I was fascinated. As I dove deeper into the technology we had implemented and what it was capable of, I knew I wanted to learn as much about cyber security as I could. Being involved in this project, and how closely I watched over our IT vendor, gave me great insight into the field and when disaster struck and we suffered a cyber security incident I was on the front lines of the recovery.

Once we recovered, I called and led a meeting with the stakeholders and our IT vendor to improve our security posture, implement a IDS and employee training to prevent another incident.