The Role of IT in Business Flashcards
What is hardware?
- the physical components of computer and computer-related acccessories
- includes a wide array of internal computer components as well as external peripheral devices
What is computer hardware?
- key hardware components within a computer include microprocessors, grphics and sound cards, hard drives, random access memory or RAM, the power supply, and the motherboard which connects most of these critical pieces
What are external hardware devices?
- do not need to be integrated into the machine itself
- computer mice, keyboards, speakers, microphones, disk drives, memory devices, network cards and monitors may be bult in or may be external devices that connect wither wirelessly or directly to a computer through a wired connection
- printers, scanners and networking equipment
What is infrastructure housing?
- the facilities and safeguards on those facilities that contain hardware, such as data centers or offices, are part of the broader IT infrastructure
- includes advanced security systems to monitor and control access
- includes ventiliation and climate control to keep temperatures down to prevent equipment from overheating
What is a networking device?
- networking hardware enables connectivity and communication between devices on a computer network
- those devices transmit information, or “packets” between devices in order to communicate with each other
- packets are pieces of data that contain multiple layers of info including headers, the length or size of the packet, its origin and destination, protocol and various other pieces of info
What is a modem?
- connects an org’s network to the internet
- modern modems have replaced traditional ones with digital broadband technology like cable modems, digital subscriber lines, and integrated services digital network
What is a router?
- manage network traffic by connecting devices to form a network
- they read the souce and destination fields in info packets to determine the most efficient path through the network for the packet to travel
- act as a link between modem and the org’s switches
- if no switches, router will connect directly to a user’s device
- assigns IP addresses
What is a switch?
- similar to routers in that they connect and divide devices within a computer network
- a network switch can turn one network jack into several network jacks so multiple devices can share one network connection
What is a gateway?
- a computer or device that acts as an intermediary between different networks
- transforms data from one protocol into another so that info can flow between networks
- a protocol is a rule or set of rules that governs the way in which info is transmitted, with one of the most common protocols being that which is used for the internet known as TCP/IP
- a gateway interprets these differing protocols and converts them into the appropriate format to facilitate network movement, usually between a co’s network and the internet
What is a server?
- physical or virtual machines that coordinate the computers, programs and data that are part of the network
- most business networks use a client/server model in which the client sends a request to the server and it provides a response or executes some action
- web servers, file servers, print servers, database servers
What is a firewall?
- software applications or hardware devices that protect a person’s or company’s network traffic by filtering it through security protocols with predefined rules
- intended to prevent unauthorized access into the organization, block malicious programs or code and prevent employees from downloading malicious programs or acessing restricted sites
- firewalls can be set to only allow trusted sources to transmit across the network
What are the 5 types of firewalls?
Circuit-level gateways- controls traffic solely based on the source of origin, the intended destination, the port and other basic info about a session although it does not filter based on the actual content so any data that is requested will be allowed through the firewall unless combined with some other filter
Application- level gateways- proxy firewalls; inspect and filter the contents of the packet based on predefined rules; can be expensive and burdensome to a network due to the amount of processing required to function
Stateful Multilayer inspection firewalls- combines the features of circuit-level and application-level gateways, but also ensures that packets are validated at multiple layers of the communication process through which those packets pass
Next Generation firewalls- provides more advanced protection than stateful multilayer inspection; further protect a network by applying more scrutiny to those packets using more sophisticated techniques such as intrusion detection, user identification, VPN and deep packet inspection
Network Address translation firewalls- converts a group of private IP addresses into a single public IP address prior to communicating with other devices outside of a co’s network; every device that connects to a private or public network is assigned an IP address so it can communicate with other devices and networks using those addresses; by masking the addresses inside a private network, it is more difficult for threats to reach any machine directly, providing an extra layer of security
What is software?
- the applications, procedures or programs that provide instructions for a computer to execute
- controlled by a user interacting with the program which gives instructions to the physical computer’s operating system
- software embedded in hardware that instructs the hardware how to operate is firmware; not updated frequently or at all
What is a Local Area Network (LAN)?
- provide network access to a limited geographic area such as a home or office
- controlled by software-defined networking (SDN) applications and uses a private IT infrastructure so that data is transported over private lines
What is a Wide Area Network (WAN)?
- provide network access to a larger geographic area such as cities, regions or countries
- connect other networks such as LANs together to provide broad coverage by also using an SDN
- the network hardware may be a combination of public and private lines, with configuration being distributed across the various locations
