ABSTRACT
The amazing advances in networking and networking technologies over the last 25 years have come from a variety of different perspectives. Disparate groups such as government research labs, the military, universities, large corporations, and countless enterprising individuals have all played a part in advancing networking technologies at a breathtaking level; however, these individual and group innovations have rarely coordinated their efforts, resulting in various camps of advancement. Some, such as IBM, Banyan, Microsoft, and Novell, focused on the development of network and desktop operating systems (and directory service) while others, such as Synoptics, Alantec, 3Com, and Cisco Systems, put their primary research efforts on high-speed network infrastructures. In the early 1990s, the very first commercially available firewalls began to be offered to organizations by companies such as Check Point Software Technologies. Only within the last few years have enterprise-class intrusion detection and prevention systems finally become commonly available to those who have the resources to acquire and manage them.
