The language of Information Technology changes with every new update, innovation and cyber threat.
It can be difficult to keep up with the latest network technology buzzwords and big ideas. With that in mind, Resilient has compiled this dictionary of networking terminology to help you track with the latest IT industry news.
802.11ac: 802.11ac is a WiFi standard with increased performance over the previous 802.11n specification. 802.11ac features three times the speed, better range and reliability and more WiFi bandwidth on mobile devices. 802.11ac Wave 2, an addendum to the original 802.11ac, takes it a step further and boosts network efficiency and provides backwards compatibility with 802.11a and n.
Advanced Threat Protection: Cybercriminals continue to innovate, deceive and ultimately breach organizations and their existing security solutions. As these attacks become more advanced, so must the security solutions used by organizations to protect themselves. Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) relies on multiple types of security technologies, products, and research -- each performing a different role, but still working seamlessly together -- to combat these attacks from network core through the end user device. FortiSandbox, secured by FortiGuard, offers inspection of all protocols and functions in one appliance.
Application Acceleration: Shortcuts to system performance that lead to massive improvements in network accessibility, speed and overal system optimization to assure a predictable end user experience. Intelligently optimizes your network performance to assure a predictable end user experience.
Bandwidth: A measurement of the ability of an electronic communications device or system (such as a computer network) to send and receive information; the capacity for data transfer of an electronic communications system.
Big Data: Big data is the large amount of data that an organization receives and generates in daily operations. How that data is captured, analyzed, and used is more important than the volume. Big data challenges include capturing data, data storage, data analysis, search, sharing, transfer, visualization, querying, updating, information privacy and data source.
Binary Packers: Cloaks malware by encrypting it in garbled portions that can’t easily be analyzed by traditional antivirus security. (One of the most common ways that hackers will use to get around the traditional sandbox today.)
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD): The policy that allows employees or students to bring their own technology into the workplace or school and use those devices to access sensitive information on the organization's network.
Botnet Command and Control Window: Begins with a dropper, clean code that connects to a URL or IP address that can download a file on command, hours, days or weeks later. (One of the most common ways that hackers will use to get around the traditional sandbox today.)
Converged Infrastructure: Servers, storage and networking designed to simplify your data center, making it more energy and space-efficient and less expensive to operate. Find out how Resilient helps transform your legacy infrastructure to a streamlined, more efficient IT infrastructure.
Digital Transformation: Digital transformation (DT) is the change associated with the application of digital technology in all aspects of human society. The transformation stage means that digital usages inherently enable new types of innovation and creativity in a particular domain, rather than simply enhance and support traditional methods.
DDoS: A Distributed Denial of Service attack works to prevent and organization and it's users from performing as intended. A DDos attack overwhelms the organizations server, website or other network resource with repeated pings or HTTP requests to overload it and render it inaccessible for a period of time.
Encrypted Archives: Malware is encrypted in an archive and social engineering is used to trick a user into open the infection by entering the password. (One of the most common ways that hackers will use to get around the traditional sandbox today.)
Enterprise Mobility: Describes the trend in work habits. Employees are shifting to working more outside of the traditional office and relying on mobile devices and cloud services to complete perform business tasks. Leads to concerns about BYOD initiatives.
Firewall: A part of a computer system or network that is designed to block unauthorized access while permitting outward communication.
Ghostware: Ghostware is software that enters a network silently, completes its targeted mission then disappears without leaving any tell-tale signs of compromise behind. In many cases, an organization invaded by ghostware may never even know it was attacked, which makes it all the more difficult to recover from the loss of data breach.
Hybrid WAN A WAN composed of MPLS and one or more broadband links. Usually the MPLS circuit, with its inherent reliability and QoS, carries WAN traffic and the public broadband link is used for Cloud plus Internet traffic and as a backup to MPLS. But this configuration has some downsides, including inefficient use of bandwidth and session drop on failover. Read more>>
Hyperconnectivity / Hyperconnected: In networking "hyperconnectivity" refers to the state of always being connected to the network. Everything and everyone that can or should connect to the internet is connected, therefore increasing bandwidth to the point of network strain.
Industry 4.0: Describes automation and data exchange in the manufacturing sector. Industry 4.0 leverages big data, IOT, connectivity, business intelligence, cloud computing, cyber-physical systems, innovation and new technology to create the "smart factory".
Intent-based Security: A system in which the end user describes what the network should do and the system automatically configures what's needed to carry out that intent, or policy.
Internet of Things (IoT): Any object that can be connected to the internet to exchange information with human interaction is part of the network of IoT. This can include everyday objects like cell phones, light bulbs, fitness trackers, refrigerators, thermostats to complex machinery like jet engines and manufacturing equipment. Network Security in this new age of technology has changed. How do you protect your organization's network environment?
Intrusion prevention system (IPS): Network security appliances that protects networks from both known and unknown threats (anomaly detection), blocking attacks that might otherwise take advantage of network vulnerabilities and unpatched systems. Intrusion prevention systems identify malicious activity, log information about this activity, attempt to block/stop it, and report it. FortiGate systems to stop attacks regardless of whether your network is wired or wireless, a partner extranet, or connected to a branch office.
IT Consolidation (Data Center Consolidation): An organizational strategy to reduce IT assets with a move to more efficient technology that results in an infrastructure that is usually smaller, more cost-effective and easier management.
IT Process Automation: The ability to orchestrate and integrate tools, people and processes through workflow. Benefits include: reduced human errors, faster response to mission-critical system problems and more efficient allocation of resources.
Latency: Latency refers to any delay in time that it takes for information to travel across the network. Latency effects user experience and productivity, ultimately costing the organization money.
Local Area Network (LAN): A system that links together electronic office equipment, such as computers and printers and forms a network within an office, building or group of buildings. A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory or office building, using network media.
Logic Bombs: The malicious part of the code remains hidden until a specified time. (One of the most common ways that hackers will use to get around the traditional sandbox today.)
Low-voltage Cabling or Structured Wiring - Structured cabling that includes music and paging systems, CCTV and security systems, fire alarms, and access control.
Jitter - Jitter in IP networks is the variation in the latency on a packet flow between two systems, when some packets take longer to travel from one system to the other. Jitter results from network congestion, timing drift and route changes.
Mission-Critical Environments: IT environments that support critical business processes such as Enterprise resource planning, Customer relationship management, Online transaction processing, Batch processing, Data warehousing and Data analysis and mining. HP Integrity servers provide purpose-built compute optimized for the highest availability, scalability, and efficiency.
Multi-site Networking: Networks that must support sharing data between multiple branches or locations within the same organization.
Network Latency: An expression of how much time it takes for a packet of data to get from one designated point to another. In some environments latency is measured by sending a packet that is returned to the sender; the round-trip time is considered the latency.
Network Security Intrusions - Network attacks from outside of an organizations network; Malicious activities or policy violations within a computer or network, such as viruses, malware, spyware, worms.
Network Storage: Network storage provides a reliable, external place for devices on the same LAN to save, access, share, back-up and recover data. Resilient offers storage solutions from backup to recovery to long-term storage needs that are risk-free, scalable and affordable.
Network Threat Protection: Encompasses both the firewall to initially block unauthorized access and the intrusion prevention system (IPS), which protects against known and unknown network threats that the firewall allowed through by analyzing the contents of the packets.
Network Attached Storage (NAS): A type of dedicated file storage device that provides local-area network local area network nodes with file-based shared storage through a standard Ethernet connection.
Network Fast Flux: Fast Flux or domain generation algorithm techniques that changes the URL or IP that an infection will connect to. (One of the most common ways that hackers will use to get around the traditional sandbox today.)
Network Vulnerability Assessment: An analysis of your organization's network that will determine the appropriate systems to ensure your database and network security. Provides you with a single source for all your security concerns.
Open Flow: OpenFlow is a standard communication protocol defined by the OpenNetworking Foundation (ONF) The protocol provides access and communication between the control and infrastructure layers of Software-defined Network (SDN) and is critical to it's success. HP is the only vendor to offer a full portfolio of enterprise data center and campus switches that are SDN-ready with OpenFlow support.
Packed Malware: Packed malware is one of the most common types of advanced malware, , carefully designed to evade the protections that most organizations rely on to detect malicious files. Q & A on Using a Real Time Sandbox to Thwart Packed Malware >>
Polymorphic Malware: Changes each time it is run, adding bits of garbage code in an effort to evade foil pattern and checksum-based inspection. (One of the most common ways that hackers will use to get around the traditional sandbox today.)
Rootkit and BootKit: Advanced malware contains a rootkit component that subverts the operation system with kernel level code to take full control of the system. (One of the most common ways that hackers will use to get around the traditional sandbox today.)
Sandboxing: A sandbox analyzes files in a contained environment to identify previously unknown threats and uncovering the full attack lifecycle. FortiSandbox is designed to detect and analyze advanced attacks designed to bypass traditional security defenses. Read about the 8 Most Common Sandbox Evasion Techniques & The Best Cyber Security Solutions >>
Sandbox Detection: APT code may contain routines that try to find out if it’s running in a virtual environment or may check for the fingerprints of a vendor's sandbox. (One of the most common ways that hackers will use to get around the traditional sandbox today.)
Security Fabric: An architectural approach that unifies the security technologies deployed across the digital network, including multi-cloud, endpoints, email and web applications, and network access points, into a single security system designed as an integrated and collaborative security fabric. Fortinet is the only company that can truly provide you with a powerful, integrated end-to-end security solution across the entire attack surface. Read more at Fortinet.com >>
Server: A computer or computer program that manages access to a centralized resource or service in a network. A good server-storage architecture will automatically optimize the use of space, power, and cooling, oOperate your business-critical workloads more efficiently with minimal risk of downtime, minimize OPEX and maximize uptime with the least amount of effort. From flexible design to energy efficiency, HP brings you breakthrough server technologies that help drive better business results.
Server Load Balancing (SLB): Distributes workloads across multiple computing resources, such as computers, a computer cluster, network links, central processing units or disk drives. Load balancing aims to optimize resource use, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload of any single resource. Resilient will help you maintain uptime of critical software and assess the efficiency & productivity of your network.
SmartRate Ethernet: HP Smart Rate multi-gigabit Ethernet modules support 802.11ac Wave 2 speeds and capacity while providing PoE+ power for future, next-generation wireless access points. HP Smart Rate modules allow you to obtain multi-gigabit performance using your existing cabling, so you won’t need to do a rip-and-replace. This dramatically simplifies and lowers the cost of deployment.
Software Defined Networking (SDN): Software Defined Networking (SDN) is the latest approach to network design that essentially changes the traffic forwarding decisions from the individual network nodes to a centralized software-based controller. It allows for dynamic responses to changing network conditions. Resilient's role is to help bridge that gap between preparing an organization's network for SDN while assisting with SDN application integration. Now, What Does It All Mean?
Spear Phishing: A email, social media or instant messaging phishing attack that targets specific individuals or groups with an organization. The content of the message is personalized or disguised to look like a trusted sender and can make it harder to decipher a genuine message from one that intends to steal sensitive information or gain unauthorized access to the or install malware on the target's system.
SSL Traffic: SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the encryption standard applied to internet communications to protect it in transit. SSL traffic is encrypted traffic and is 40-50% of all internet traffic. If the URL changes to HTTPS, it’s encrypted.
Stealth Malware: Some of the most pervasive and hardest-to-detect forms of malware threatening networks today include ghostware, two-faced malware and malware hidden in compressed files. Includes, Ghostware, Two-faced Malware and Malware Hidden in Compressed Files.Malware Hidden in Compressed Files.
Storage Area Network (SAN): SAN is a high-speed network of storage devices that also connects those storage devices with servers, typically used in business networks.
Structured Cabling: The wiring infrastructure that supports all of the telecommunications cabling infrastructure throughout a building or campus. With a flexible cabling infrastructure, a structured cabling system can support multiple voice, data, video and multimedia systems regardless of their manufacturer. A well-designed cabling plant may include several independent cabling solutions of different media types, installed at each workstation to support multiple system performance requirements.
The Cloud: A network of servers that allow on-demand, remote access to files and data stored on the internet. Web-based email (Gmail), cloud storage (Dropbox), Web Apps (Facbook, Google Docs) are all common uses of the cloud.
Thin Client: A thin client is a computer or a computer program that does not have a cd-rom, expansion slots or a hard drive, making it heavily dependent on another computer (its server) to fulfill its computational roles.
Thin Client Applications: Thin client is also used to describe software applications that use the client-server model where the server performs all the processing. See HP Virtual Client Essentials
Two-Faced Malware: Two-faced malware has emerged in response to the growing pervasiveness of network security sandboxes that run incoming programs in safe, isolated environments to observe any suspicious behaviors before releasing them into the larger network. To get around this, two-faced malware performs benign processes while being scrutinized in the security sandbox; then triggers malicious actions when let out into the network. The danger is that once the sandbox flags code as safe and reports that to the threat intelligence system, it can no longer be detected in future attacks.
Unified Communications (UC): Term used to describe the real-time integration of messaging systems (call, fax, text, email, instant messaging, calendaring, mobility) used for business. Allows users to access information and communication tools through one interface.
Unified Threat Management (UTM): The approach that many organizations have adopted to improve visibility and control of their network security while lowering complexity of their networks. UTM creates an environment in which all network security falls beneath a single, consistent technology umbrella. UTM enables the consolidation of all traditional as well as nextgeneration firewall functions into a single device. UTM generally refers to a security appliance that consolidates a wide range of essential network security functions into a single device, including next-generation firewall technologies like application control.
Virtualization: Virtualization is a proven software technology that makes it possible to run multiple operating systems and applications on the same server at the same time. It’s the process of creating a virtual, rather than physical, version of something. Server Virtualization can apply to computers, operating systems, storage devices, applications, or networks. Virtualization uses software to simulate the existence of hardware and create a virtual computer system. Doing this allows businesses to run more than one virtual system – and multiple operating systems and applications -- on a single server. This can provide economies of scale and greater efficiency.
Voice over IP/Intercom: A methodology and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet.
WAN Load Balancing: Load balancing designed to make better use of available bandwidth is a key element in WAN design. The most simplistic load balancing assigns individual sessions to a path, often without regard to link characteristics and application requirements. More sophisticated ones balance by the packet. Packet load balancing without intelligence can result in out of order packets and high loss and the resulting retransmits can cause worse performance than no load balancing at all. Talari's intelligent load balancing spreads a single session across multiple links only when the end result will be improved performance. It also adapts to changing conditions and moves packets off links as quality degrades or links fail without disrupting the session. And its loss mitigation and reorder control compensates for dissimilar link characteristics. The Talari Difference
WAN Optimization: Techniques for reducing the amount of time it takes data to cross the WAN or that is downloaded from Internet sites. Improves WAN communications and the performance of business critical applications across your network.
Wide Area Network (WAN): A wide area network (WAN) is a network that covers a broad area (i.e., any telecommunications network that links across metropolitan, regional, national or international boundaries).
Wireless LAN (WLAN): A wireless local area network (WLAN) links two or more devices over a short distance using a wireless distribution method, usually providing a connection through an access point for Internet access.
Wireless Network: A wireless network is any type of computer network that uses wireless data connections for connecting devices such as laptops to the Internet and your organization's network.
Zero-Day Attacks: An exploit that exposes a vulnerability that was either completely unknown to the victim or hasn't been patched yet.
