IT structure review

[simodago]

Hi everybody,

 

I'm working on a project for school about technology and I have to see whether the IT structure of a hotel is functional enough or if things can be updated. As I'm not really knowledgeable about firewalls, switches, routers etc. it would be nice if somebody can review it and give some advice! 

The hotel is 25hours Hotel The Circle, located in Cologne (Germany). It has 8 floors and 207 rooms.

 

I'm leaving attached the scheme of the IT structure, so it's easier to understand.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

[Frostbite4075]

I'm not sure whether the diagram is actually indicating that there are only 3x access points, but if it is, that's going to be an issue. the Unifi AC-Pro's can technically support over 100 clients each but I would argue that 3 is hardly enough for an 8 floor hotel. Wi-Fi signals through load-bearing walls/floors is going to be weak. Not to mention if the hotel was at full capacity at say 2 people per room, that's around 400 people (maybe more if more than 2 people are staying per room). Even going by the maximum clients on the UAP-AC-Pro datasheet this is a stretch, and that's before you consider signal issues.

 

I would say the point about the website being slow specifically on mobile devices is certainly an indicator that the Wi-Fi is the main issue here. Ultimately the switches and router are decent and there's not going to be huge amount of data moving around, so the main issue is going to be connectivity / range as opposed to a bottleneck in the wired infrastructure.

 

In terms of what could be updated - for starters using an on premise website and mail server is an old way of doing things. Don't get me wrong, self hosting certainly has it's place - but for a business, there is no reason not to host a website in the cloud - the speed and availability benefits alone are going to be huge.

 

Also on-premise email is a bad idea for availability - if the hotel or server loses power, no more emails. You also have so much more management overhead - you need to maintain an operating system, mail services, updates/patching, power monitoring etc - whereas if you host email in the cloud such as with Microsoft Exchange, it's all taken care of for you.

 

Same can be said for the storage, although this comes down to internet speed - if there is limited internet or poor speeds in the area, then that's a reason to stick with on-premise storage. On the other hand, if there is a stable, fast internet connection, then the storage could be hosted elsewhere. This would resolve the capacity issues too.

 

If you asked Microsoft how to update this infrastructure they would tell you to get rid of all the Servers, replace them with Azure for Active Directory and Website hosting, SharePoint for file sharing, Exchange for email. Then get rid of the thin clients, and use portable devices with Windows 365 instead of the RDS setup. Make everything 100% cloud based. Not everyone is ready for all these changes but this is definitely the way of the future.

 

The other benefit of moving everything to the cloud is that the strain on the network resources such as switching/routing capacity is going to be much less, meaning you don't need to throw more money upgrading the network - although either way more access points are needed.