How to organize communication between two company offices?

Question

Computer networks

Hello!
The problem, in general, is standard, but I want to make a small checklist, since I myself have not dealt with this until now.
There is a main office of the company with a server on which 1C and file storage are running. The server is a machine running Server 2008 R2.
Internal network of about 100 computers with a 1C thick client.
The company opens a branch in another part of the city (in Russia), which, of course, needs a real-time connection to 1C and file storage.
The specific characteristics of the server and the network topology are not known to me at the moment, simply because the "customer" (the company in which I am writing my term paper, yes, the student) is afraid to tell them until I definitely agree to help them.
Questions:

1. What exactly do you need to know in order to understand how to organize a network?
   
2. With what hardware channels? Will the standard Internet + VPN be enough, or do I need to rent communication lines?
   
3. What technologies are most suitable for implementation? Heard about OpenVPN,
   maybe there is something else?
   
4. What will be the topology? Will it be necessary (for example, when using OpenVPN) to install its own server in the branch network, or will everything work on the head office server?
   

Answer 1

3) Any solution that allows you to organize a VPN
4) nothing is needed, only a piece of iron initiating a communication channel
according to clause 2, a communication channel for 1C will not be enough (and renting a thick channel is too costly and pointless), for good you need to either make a terminal server and through it go to 1C, or make a local database with 1C in the branch and synchronize it with the central office. then the channel width is enough.
some lyrics: if you, a student with no experience, are puzzled by such a task, you will encounter budget restrictions, work for free (connection was lost at 3 a.m. URGENTLY DO IT !!) and other quirks of offices that save on specialists. Consider it, of course it is a useful experience, but they are not nerves of steel.

Answer 2

OpenVPN is quite suitable for these tasks. But you must understand that the client's 1C file base pulls a huge amount of data. I'm afraid to guess how much you will lay out for a channel of the desired width. However, some providers provide VPN services within their networks. That is, you pay a little more for the Internet, the channel width remains the same, but the speed between your branches will be limited only by the bandwidth of the provider's network.

Answer 3

What exactly do you need to know in order to understand how to organize a network?

Completely all the data: the number of clients of the remote office, the number of clients sitting in the yellowprog, the number of clients, shares, average and peak traffic shares. requirements for security, security and non-failure connection.
Depending on the results of the calculation for the first paragraph, a simple VPN may be enough, or a rental channel may be needed. Everything needs to be worked out on the spot through economic/organizational/bureaucratic realities.
Depending on the results of the first two points: from simple forwarding through Hamachi, to vlan over a dedicated fiber.
Again, depending on the realities, if there are 3-5 clients, then a simple OpenVPN will survive even on a modem, if you plan a powerful network for> 20 clients, then you need to make a local client-server infrastructure and exchange between branches at the server level.

Answer 4

Perhaps it is worth raising the RDP server at the main office and sharing 1C as a remoteapp application. Unite offices with a GRE tunnel. And encryption is optional, you can even just enable TLS in RDP.