Hey all,

I'm working on a network architecture setup for an e-commerce provider; I've been Googling and reading up for days, but I can't seem to find a general "secure" network setup for an e-commerce environment (I've seen every network diagram from the first 15 Google and Yahoo image pages using the terms "network", "diagram", "e-commerce", "secure", "setup" and a bunch of other terms in all possible combinations, and I didn't get any further...). It's for a school project, so I'm not limited by money or anything else (only by time)

Here are some things that I came up with - with a bunch of questions attached...

Does an e-commerce server go in the DMZ along with the web server? How does the interaction between the e-commerce server and the web server take place? How does the interaction between the customer and the e-commerce server take place (just SSL, or is there more to it)? How is the e-commerce server firewalled? What if you want to do your own credit card processing - do you connect a database server to the e-commerce server? How does that database server communicate with the credit card issuer? How do you implement three-tier security in this set-up? Where does an IDS fit in in this scheme?

Anyone have some pointers to guide me in the right direction?

Thanks!