Challenger Constructions Case Study
Challenger Constructions Ltd is a building and construction company located in regional New South Wales. It has a number of separate, but related divisions:
- Design and consultancy services,
- Earthworks and site preparation,
- Commercial construction,
- Home building and renovation, and a
- Painting and decorating division.
The company has a small data center at its main site in Orange where the company’s servers and data storage is located.
The company has some 300 staff, of whom 50 work in the Orange and Bathurst offices. These 50 staff include management, administrative staff and design and consultancy staff. The remaining staff mainly work on different construction sites. The company has two dedicated IT staff to maintain their IT assets and network. The company has a range of different types of personal computers, which run a mixture of Windows 10 and Windows 7 Enterprise, to connect to the company data center. The company also has 3 MacBook laptops running OS X.
The different construction division foremen communicate with the company using a number of iPads. These are used to update project management schedules and details and to take photos of the progress of various constructions. These iPads are kept by the different foremen and are often also used for personal communications and web access.
The company does not have a clear patching and update policy. As a result most servers and desktop machines are patched on an ad-hoc basis and as time, and operations, permit. The patching and/or updating of the company’s iPads has not been considered.
The company’s IT staff are responsible for the management of the server infrastructure and company network. But effective administration is somewhat hampered by the fact that the administrative passwords are generally well-known across the company. Company employees enjoy free, open, unrestricted access to the Internet, but realistically they only need to access certain websites on the Internet. Company management would like to minimize the cost of accessing web resources.
The company consists of the following divisions:
- Design and consultancy staff (15 people)
- Systems administration (2 people)
- Management (6 people)
- Human Resources & Legal (3 people)
- Finance (3 people)
- Administration (2 people)
- Challenger Constructions earthworks, building and painting staff (270 people)
There are no formal onboarding and offboarding processes in the organisation. There is close to no policy framework in the organisation.
Infrastructure
The company uses several servers to conduct its core business. The company has the following server infrastructure:
- 2 x Active Directory domain controllers on Windows Server 2012 R2;
- 3 x SQL Server 2012 database servers on Windows Server 2012;
- 1 x Exchange 2013 email server on Windows Server 2012 R2;
- 4 x Windows Server 2016 File and Print servers;
- 2 x Red Hat Enterprise Linux v7.1 servers running Apache TomCat v7.0.
