Distributed Network Integration and monitoring - CNET Networking & wireless Forums

All depends how much money you have to spend. The functions you want will require you to place a device at each location. You basically have 2 different requirements. One to identify and limit traffic and another to connect all your machines together.

The second is you standard corporate network which as robert pointed out is a VPN solution. The other in its most basic form is provided by a device that is generally called a intrusion detection prevention system.

Both these function can be provided by most commercial firewalls. Juniper,cisco,fortigate as well as many other sell a wide range of devices. You most likely will pay at least $500 per unit and even more for large sites with 100's of users. Many of these devices are licensed by number of sessions. Many offer the ability to purchase filter lists so you can just say "no porn sites" and not have to build the ip lists yourself.

If you are talking a large number of offices you may want to pay someone to help you before you go out and buy stuff. You get into the huge issue of having to maintain and monitor all these devices so you keep constant policies.

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sounds great to me if moneywas not a constraint

by kiransdusk - 8/11/12 9:29 PM

In Reply to: budget by bill012

Is there a web based solution we can think about. Like having a centralised server through which all the traffics are routed.

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central server

by bill012 - 8/12/12 4:00 AM

In Reply to: sounds great to me if moneywas not a constraint by kiransdusk

Yes there are many and some are free if you have the skills to configure the server. You could either use a single large version of the firewall filter or you might be able to use a proxy server.

The key here is the word "Routed". How do you get all this traffic to a centralized server. You still need some form of VPN box at each location to take it all back to a central location. You have the addition issue of bandwidth in your central site being large enough to take all the traffic from the remote site and then send it back to the internet if it is allowed. Then you have the performance issue of having the traffic flow all the way to your central location which causes huge issues when you sites are in countries all over the world.

Now you could try to avoid the VPN hardware by using only a central proxy server but then you must trust the users to set the proxy in their browsers correctly and this only works for browser based traffic, things like games or bit torrent would not be restricted. You still have all the capacity and performance issue of a centralized solution.

There really is not a cheap way to do this. This is one of the key reasons corporate networks cost so much to implement. Would be nice if employees would just follow the rules.