Computers that communicate

- [Instructor] The main goal of networking is going to be, to allow access to share data as well as make all programs and data available to anyone on the network without the thought to the physical location of the data. We also need the network to be highly reliable by having alternative locations to locate that data just as in a big data network like Microsoft Azure or AWS at Amazon. What does it take to make up a network? Well, we need to have at least two or more networked computing devices. They don't have to be computers, they could be tablets or smartphones or other types of devices that require any type of IP communication. The transmission can either be wired or wireless communication. This means you could have two or more Wi-Fi devices, wired devices or any combination. We're also going to need to use the protocol of IP or Internet Protocol and we typically use TCP over IP because transmission control protocol allows for a connection oriented type of communication. There's other protocols that can run on top of IP such as UDP, but all secure communications such as banking sites, shopping sites and others are going to need to use TCP over IP for that connection oriented type of communication. Besides the transmission of wired or wireless communication and TCP over IP, we're also going to need a network operating system. And network operating system basically means that can communicate with either Wi-Fi or wired communications, and Windows 10 is the most popular one at the moment for PCs. However, we also have the Android and apple iOS and Macintosh operating systems as well. And don't forget about Linux, as well as Linux servers and Windows servers. And I'm sure you can still find a lot of Unix servers at the enterprise level. What are the goals of today's modern operating systems and communications? Well, the first one has to be security, and that's because we don't want to have our data compromised or stolen. Ransomware and other malware has taken over many parts of the internet and can steal a lot of information as well as your finances from our network operating systems. We're also concerned about speed and reliability, we want to make sure we can not only get onto the network but we want to be able to stay on that network and run at a good speed. Then we're going to need some automatic processes without intervention. We want things to happen in the background without us always having to remember to do things. Maintenance tasks and updates are good examples of that type of automatic process. And we want to be able to access this data from multiple locations, whether we're at home or at work or other locations, we want to be able to securely and safely access that data also reliably. Another goal would be to save money, we don't necessarily want to spend a $1000 or more on connecting to the internet, we want it be as little of cost as possible and we want to save time as well. We don't want to fight with a bunch of different applications just to get online or get access to our data. And we need useful data, useful data means data that we can actually use for our business or personal life whatever it is we need to use our data for, we needed to be useful and not a lot of junk data. Unfortunately, we do tend to save a lot of data that's no longer needed and we have a hard time deleting it because we're not sure if we may need it in the future. And that ends up filling up our hard drives and filling up our backups. There are many reasons for having a data network no matter where your data is located. Keeping it available and secure is not an easy task as there are issues of hacking, poor programming, and equipment designed to last only a few years.