Section 1: History -ShelbyWhen you sit down at the movies theatre and you are excited to see the new films that are

released, do you ever just wonder what exactly goes into creating that film? Well, if you have ever seen Suicide Squad, Divergent, Ender's Game, and many more movies, you can thank Digital Domain. Digital Domain is a company that is in Playa Vista, Los Angeles, California. They are known for their incredible works with visual effects and motion capture.

Digital Domain was started by three men: James Cameron, Stan Winston, and Scott Ross. These three men were all involved in the film industry and in 1993 they came together to create Digital Domain. James Cameron is extremely talented with his skills in writing, directing, editing, and producing films. The films that James Cameron is known for are The Terminator, Aliens, and The Abyss. Stan Winston is known for his works on the sets of The Terminator, Jurassic Park, and Aliens. Mr. Wilson specialized in make-up, puppets, practical, and digital effects. He also had his very own effects studio which was named Stan Winston Digital. After winning many Emmy Awards, he started to receive more job offers in which he was able to work with James Cameron again for Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Scott Ross is known for his thirty years of work as a digital media executive. Mr. Ross was able to win about five Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects; which included Terminator 2: Judgement Day and The Abyss. During this time, he was the General Manager at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) at Lucasfilms and eleven years later he rose to Senior Vice President of LucasArts Entertainment Company. In 1993, however, all three men decided to join to create Digital Domain where Scott Ross was able to win the company two Academy Awards, two Oscars, and three Scientific and Technical Academy Awards.

However, everything was not sunshine and rainbows for the three men. There was huge controversy between James Cameron and Scott Ross; especially in 1998. James Cameron insisted that they work over time on the film Titanic, while Scott Ross was trying to avoid having the company go into bankruptcy. After Titanic was finished filming and aired to the people, James Cameron and Stan Winston both decided to resign from the board of directors. Stan Winston still collaborated with James Cameron on his Terminator series and Avatar along with working on some of Steven Spielberg’s movies. On June 15, 2008 Stan Winston died at his home from multiple myeloma. Now-a-days, James Cameron is working on the sequels to Avatar, which should now be coming out in December 2020, documentaries, and his deep-sea dives. Scott Ross, in 2006, about thirteen years after creating Digital Domain decided to sell the company to Michael Bay and John Textor.

Within six years of John Textor taking over, he drove Digital Domain into bankruptcy. John Textor was the founder of Wyndecrest Holdings which was a private holding company. Since they were losing money every year, Mr. Textor decided to get some financial help. from the State of Florida and some private investors. Mr. Textor wanted to create an animation studio for the parent company of Digital Domain; Digital Domain Media Group (DDMG). Not long after a New York Hedge fund, which was affiliated with Florida Power and Light, decided to acquire DDMG, and move up the payment period. DDMG turned to Tenor Capital to help them out of the debt they were in and Tenor Capital agreed. They signed a thirty-five million dollar

loan with Tenor Capital only to realize a couple months later what a huge mistake this was. Tenor Capital was shorting DDMG stocks, so they could profit from their failure. To get out of the deal with Tenor Capital, DDMG would have to pay fifty-one million dollars. With this, John Textor submitted his letter of resignation from DDMG and DDMG had to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy while selling Digital Domain to Searchlight Capital Partners. Both Searchlight and CEO, Ed Ulbrich, of Digital Domain released statements about how this new chapter for Digital Domain will keep the company healthy and vibrant.

Today, Digital Domain is now run by CEO Daniel Seah who has been running the company for about four years. They still hold true to their vision statement which is: “Digital Domain creates transportive experiences that entertain, inform and inspire. Our Company is a pioneer in many fields, including visual effects, livestreaming landmark events in 360 degree virtual reality, building situational awareness applications, creating “virtual humans” for use in films and live events, and developing interactive content.” (cite this) You can see this with their 360 degree cameras. It first started out coming up with the technology to create the Google Street View and continued until they were able to build and develop Kronos. Kronos is a spherical camera that allows for 360 degree broadcasting, provides 12-bit image processing, audio, single-cable interface for both power and data, is water resistant, and very light. They say that Kronos is exceptional for Situational Awareness applications. With the help from Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Philip Atwell, and Dylan Brown, Digital Domain was able to bring Tupac back to life as his hologram amazed 180,000 fans while performing two shows at Coachella. Not only have they dabbled in bringing people back to life, but they have also helped some companies with their commercials. For instance, Digital Domain created the pool in which a man swam in for the advertisement of Dollar Shave Club’s Shave Butter. The have also won a couple awards this past year which include: 2017 Sci-Tech Award and 2017 Ves Award.

Section 2: Enterprise Architecture - Chai Thomas

Digital Domain’s strategy is to be the pioneer in visual effects, live streaming events in 360 degree virtual reality, creating virtual humans for film and live events, and creating interactive content. Digital Domain’s mission is to create experiences that entertain, inform, and inspire.The company’s strategy and mission contribute to them being a pioneer and having a competitive advantage over their competitors.

Digital Domain competes in the visual effect industry. They provided a lot of services including visual effects for hit movies such as The Titanic, Furious 7, and Deadpool. Digital Domain provided the Tupac hologram for Coachella. The company also supplied video game cinematics for Quantum Break and Tomb Raider. Some of Digital Domain’s competitors include Sony Pictures Imageworks and Industrial Light and Magic.

There are two types of networks that Digital Domain uses. The two types of networks are I/O network and Production network. Files and data are transferred through the I/O and Production networks separated by a firewall. This wide area network (WAN) is used in all Digital Domain’s three locations.

Section 3: Documentation of the Network– Mohamed Cassim

According to our contact from Digital Domain, their data transfer diagram is posted

above. This network diagram focuses on the incoming and outgoing flow of data. Outgoing process of data transfer takes place in 4 steps. First, users access gatekeeper’s web interface to

list files for transfer. Second, list of files is placed on a watch folder on the GX for Charon. Third, Charon transfers the files from GX to IO via the firewall. Fourth, specialized users then go to a secure area to transfer files out. Incoming data transfer process occurs in 2 stages. First, files are placed in a watch folder. Second, files are transferred from IO into GX via firewall and then Charon. During the incoming and outgoing process of data, Digital Domain has a firewall which separates the I/O network from the production network. Then a Charon is used to virtualize the same old system, so they don’t need to update their software, every time the company upgrades

the hardware.

Fazran also mentioned, at this location in Los Angeles, there are 500 workstations, that are connected by over 3 patch panels and Digital Domain uses a NIS server which uses Active Directory. Their users(employees) are on an ISLA server by Spike where the users are denied access to the internet. According to his information the production side of the network seem very secure. On the I/O network users need to login to the Ingest/Egest stations to transfer files in or out of the organizations. This becomes an added security layer for the network.

Section 4: Critique of Network Infrastructure- Cody Stout

The network diagram sent by our contact Fazran at Digital Domain highlights the technical specifications and geographical layout of this wide area network. However, this WAN has not been updated since 2015, and many networking advancements have arisen since then. Fazran has

provided our team with server and storage specifications as well that allow us to better speculate on the security of this network infrastructure. From the provided figures, we notice that there is a firewall between the public and private networks of Digital Domain. To avoid malicious attacks, a valid security recommendation would be to add a firewall at the edge of the network before data reaches the ingest/egest (inflow/outflow) stations. In these stations, servers determine whether they can grab data from their connected storage or must bypass the firewall to access more critical data. A firewall protecting the ingest/egest stations would ensure that inflows and outflows of data are not halted by attackers in a denial of service attack. This firewall, and the existing firewall, must both be scalable for the growing amount of data continuously transmitting. A crucial area of concern in this network is circuit capacity. In 2015, a 1 gigabyte connection was adequate for most operations. In 2018, a visual effects company running applications that require a high amount of processing and bandwidth must use circuits of a higher capacity, such as a 10 GB connection. This 1GB circuit is connecting the core site and rented data center spaces which are accessed most frequently, so updating these connections will reduce the chance of circuit bottlenecks and provide room for growth within Digital Domain. If these applications must access the internet, there could be bottleneck potential within the connections to the internet service providers Zayo and Windstream as these are currently 300 Mbps and 50 Mbps circuits from the core site. The final circuit issue we will highlight is the dark fiber connections by Optic Zoo and Terapsan. These fiber connections lack redundancy, and if one of the connections were to be cut, there would not be access to data stored at the Broadway and Scalar sites. At each of the rented data centers, older servers are being deployed that have limitations on virtualization and separation of workloads. Digital Domain should look to update these existing servers as generation 8 and generation 1 HP servers are being used at these locations, while the new HP market standard products are generation 10. Newer generation servers are physically smaller, taking up less of the rented rack space within the data centers. Though smaller in size, these servers better utilize their storage capacity allowing for more growth within the company. Additionally, this newer equipment has updated cooling capacity, reducing utility costs at the data centers. Generation 10 servers provide Digital Domain with the option of creating virtual switches and routers ran by the servers to save on updating networking hardware as well. These software enabled virtual machines can assist network managers to change network configurations from any site where they can gain access to the Digital Domain network.

These technical suggestions can greatly enhance the enterprise architecture of Digital Domain. This company works with the latest virtual reality applications and must have low latency to complete projects in a timely fashion. Upgrading circuits and servers decreases this latency. By upgrading firewalls and security measures, this organization can achieve a sense of comfort by ensuring their numerous patents and trade secrets are stored safely. Finally, the potential for virtualization highlighted in the last section by deploying new equipment helps the

company to save on costs and time. If employees can save time by having more flexible network management tools enabled by software, then they can complete a higher level of strategic work- which is the overall goal of enterprise architecture. Section 5: Solving the challenge - Waleed Al Amri

One of the limitation of firewall is its architecture. Most firewalls work only at top-most layers of the network models, thus offering lower security levels. The limitation of firewalls is the configuration of a network. If the network is not configuring properly, the firewall can’t provide protection against that. Also, if there is a lapse in the network design, most of firewalls will fail, no matter how much Digital Domain spends on the network safety. This can be controlled by including experienced network designers and restricting access to other computers from installing a proper internet connection such as a dial up connection. All that should be installed in the main computer to overcome the limitation of firewall properly. Therefore, the method for overcoming this limitation is by creating a set of rules that compels the firewall to scan the data package on depth. The method allows the firewall to inspect each connection that comes to the network and compares the data in source, destination, and service etc. to the first rule, so if the connection matches the rule, the firewall applies the action of that rule. However, if the connection does not match the rule, the firewall continues with the next rule in the rule base.

Another, the best way to determine whether the Digital Domain has enough bandwidth is to track the loss and delay for the system. This method can be done with less money spent which can be used any modern ping implementation that allows to set DSCP markings. For case, if the system is being impacted by high loss and delay, then it’s the time to upgrade the bandwidth.

Moreover, the Digital Domain may to consider WAN optimization. By using data reduction techniques, but it may be able to carry several times more traffic over the same link. By WAN optimization, it could be easy to implement the QoS policies and able to track the system and network path loss and delay statistics.

In solving the challenges, we focus on lowering the cost of overcome these limitations while providing the best technical and business solutions. These challenges are costly in terms of upgrading to the latest equipment. The challenges like latency and circuit capacity can be solved by changing the data center to one that provides newer generation of servers that can reduce the separation on workload and provide better visualization, and use virtual switches and routers ran by the servers to save on updating networking hardware.

While using Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) that provides essential network device information including bandwidth utilization. In the context of bandwidth analysis, Digital Domain would use SNMP to determine how much data is being transmitted over a network interface. Solutions should also focus on network monitoring tool that gives the Digital Domain a broad overview of the health of their network, highlights trouble spots, and lets them drill down to lower levels of detail as needed. Then they can be proactive about spotting emerging problems and acting.