Page 92 - DCAP309_INFORMATION_SECURITY_AND_PRIVACY

Information Security and Privacy

Notes
Example: Instead of giving each of 10 employees in a department an expensive color
printer (or resorting to the “sneakernet” again), one printer can be placed on the network for
everyone to share.

 Internet Access: The Internet is itself an enormous network, so whenever you access the
Internet, you are using a network. The significance of the Internet on modern society is
hard to exaggerate, especially for those of us in technical fields.

 Internet Access Sharing: Small computer networks allow multiple users to share a single
Internet connection. Special hardware devices allow the bandwidth of the connection to
be easily allocated to various individuals as they need it, and permit an organization to
purchase one high-speed connection instead of many slower ones.

 Data Security and Management: In a business environment, a network allows the
administrators to much better manage the company’s critical data. Instead of having this
data spread over dozens or even hundreds of small computers in a haphazard fashion as
their users create it, data can be centralized on shared servers. This makes it easy for
everyone to find the data, makes it possible for the administrators to ensure that the data
is regularly backed up, and also allows for the implementation of security measures to
control who can read or change various pieces of critical information.

 Performance Enhancement and Balancing: Under some circumstances, a network can be
used to enhance the overall performance of some applications by distributing the
computation tasks to various computers on the network.
 Entertainment: Networks facilitate many types of games and entertainment. The Internet
itself offers many sources of entertainment, of course. In addition, many multi-player
games exist that operate over a local area network. Many home networks are set up for
this reason, and gaming across wide area networks (including the Internet) has also become
quite popular. Of course, if you are running a business and have easily-amused employees,
you might insist that this is really a disadvantage of networking and not an advantage.

Notes Most of the benefits of networking can be divided into two generic categories:
connectivity and sharing. Networks allow computers, and hence their users, to be connected
together. They also allow for the easy sharing of information and resources, and
cooperation between the devices in other ways. Since modern business depends so much
on the intelligent flow and management of information, this tells you a lot about why
networking is so valuable.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. A ............................... is simply a collection of computers or other hardware devices that are
connected together,
2. ................................ is the term that describes the processes involved in designing,
implementing, upgrading, managing and otherwise working with networks and network
technologies.

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