What is BYOD

BYOD

Bring your own device (BYOD) refers to the IT or enterprise trend of employees using personal devices to connect to their organizational networks and access work-related systems and potentially sensitive or confidential data. Those personal devices could include smart phones, personal laptops, tablets, or USB drives.

IT departments of organizations must address how they can secure personal devices and determine access levels. Most important, there should be a defined BYOD security policy to provide awareness and educate employees on how to adhere to BYOD without compromising organizational data or networks.

The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy within its acceptable uses allows anyone who has a smart phone or portable device to access to computing tools at any time to use them when accessing the corporate data and performing any other information management processes in the context of the organization-related tasks and issues.

When employees use their own device, it gives them the flexibility and increases their productivity since they are familiar with their own devices and, therefore, are bound to work faster and more efficiently. Some other advantages are mentioned as below;

Advantages

• Cost Saving
• Productivity
• Job Satisfaction
• Time effectiveness
• Flexibility

Disadvantages

• Security
• Data Retrieval
• Technical Support

Similarly the entire IT industry was supporting for the Bring Your Own Application (BYOA) software or application for increased productivity.

Now all the BYOA software your employees utilize, you start to get a picture of the possibilities for waste reduction. You can Integrate their favorite messaging apps, calendars, presentation tools and file clouds, and the benefit of work management scales exponentially as you add users into the system. If you make the whole thing accessible through a single desktop or mobile interface, you’ve created a really special work experience for the employee, and one that allows them to push and pull information to and from their teams with minimal communications waste.

BYOD Policy at a glance:

• Blocking access to other websites during business hours and while employees are connected to the company's network. The list of other websites, or types of websites, should be provided to employees.
• Employees may not use their devices at any time to store or transmit proprietary information or organization confidential materials, inside business information etc.
• Allowing employees to access company owned and provided resources only such as: calendars, email, documents, internal networks, etc.
• If the device is idle for five minutes or such specific time, it must automatically lock itself and require a pin or password to be unlocked.
• Any unauthorized app that is not on the company's list of approved apps cannot be downloaded or installed by employees.

So this is just a information on BYOD, for more details you can refer other sources. 

- DR

Difference between L2 and L3 Switch

What is Difference between a L2 and L3 Switch.

We all have heard about Layer-2 and Layer-3 switches. The difference between layer 2 and layer 3 switches is always an important thing to keep in mind.

On a Layman point, the L2 and L3 switch differs from each other primarily in the routing function.  

A L2 switch works with MAC addresses only and does not works on IP address or any others. Whereas, L3 switch has capable of doing all the job of a layer 2 switch and additional static routing and dynamic routing as well.

Therefore, a Layer 3 switch has both MAC address table and IP routing table, and it handles intra-VLAN communication and packets routing between different VLANs. L3 is mostly used for VLAN configurations and it has multiple broadcast domain. In L3 it enhances more security, reliability, power.

Difference between a L3 switch and Router

Similarly in transport layer, the router has the L3 feature but the router is always advised for network where there is requirement of WAN, Internet or ISP integration there.

A router have below features which are not available in L3 switches.

• WAN
• WAN Interface
• NAT
• Advanced Routing
• QoS
• Tunneling
• IPSec
• Support multiple routing table

When buying a Layer 2 or Layer 3 switch, there are some key parameters that need to be checked such as forwarding rate, backplane bandwidth, number of VLANs, memory of MAC address, latency, etc.

So this was just a basic note for understanding. If you have any comments please feel free to post. 

Thank you.

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-DR

Basics of Switching | Switches- part 2

Basics of Switching

Switching is a basic function of networking. Switching breaks up large collision domains in to smaller ones.

A Switch or a LAN switch is a hardware device little advanced than the traditional Hubs used for broadcasting based on software.

• A switch can be a multi-port Bridge.
• Switch have the forwarding decision same as the bridge and have simultaneous data transfer.
• It establishes connection using the MAC addresses of the devices.

Many OEMS (original equipment manufacturer) now are in market with their advanced switches. A switch have many ports for connecting the cables. It comes in different numbers such as 8, 12, 24, 48 etc.

A typical Cisco Switch device

When it comes of switching in networking, it describes in two ways : 

Circuit Switching & Packet Switching

It is used to move traffic from one part of network to another. Data received from the input port need to be transmitted to one or more output port .

Just understand with some visuals :

According to the Application layers, switches are also used in 1-7 layers. There are three main functions of layer-2 switching as below:

• Address Learning
• Forward/filter decisions
• Loop Avoidance

There are different types of switches available. User have to choose as per their requirement. Below mentioned are the types;

• Modular Switch
• Fixed-Configuration Switch
• Un-managed Switch
• Managed Switch
• Smart Switch
• Stackable Switch
• PoE switch
• Virtual Switch

While choosing switch also you need to check the number of ports available, speed of the switch (10/100 Mbps, 10/100/1000 Mbps etc.), PoE (Power over Ethernet or non PoE), Stackable or standalone. 

Now a days switches come with ports such as 10, 16, 24, 28, 48 and 52.

-DR

Basics of IP Addressing

IP Address 

Internet Protocol

An IP Address is a numeric identifier assigned to each Computer System. It identifies the location of the device in a network. Its a software address embedded in to a Network Interface Card (NIC).

In a IP Address it is a combination of some host & network address. It consists of 32 bits of Information. The Core function of IP is to provide logical addressing.

1 Bit : Means a one digit i.e. 1 or 0.

1 Byte : 8 Bits.

As well,

An IP address is a 32 bit, divided in to 4 sections each of 1 byte.

An IP address can be noted in different methods :-

1. Dotted Decimal

2. Binary

3. Hexa-decimal.

Example :-

IP address : 164.102.146.52

Binary Octet : 244.146.222.64

Hexadecimal : 00A4.0066.0092.0034

32 bit Binary : 10100100.01100110.10010010.00110100

NETWORK ADDRESSING:

Based upon network size, Number of Hosts, Number of Network the Network has been configured in 5 type of classes. ( A, B, C, D, E )

From smaller Network to a Large scale Network are defined in different classes as HOST & NETWORK each with 1 Byte = 8 Bits.

Range of IP Classes:

A : 0-127 : 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000

B : 128- 191 : 10000000 00000000 00000000 00000000

C : 192-223 : 11000000 00000000 00000000 00000000

D : 224-239 : Reserved for Multicast.

E : 240-255 : Used for experiment and Research.

Basic Subnetting:

Sub-netting is fundamentally a way of splitting a TCP/IP network into smaller, more controllable pieces. 

Subnet Mask:

A subnet Mask defines a range or a portion of an IP address and is a 32 bit value.

DEFAULT SUB-NET MASKS :

A : 255.0.0.0

B : 255.255.0.0

C : 255.255.255.0

A Network can be split in to multiple smaller logical networks.

Network Mask or prefix indicates which bits to compare when making routing decisions.

PRIVATE ADDRESS CLASS :

A : 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255

B : 172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255

C : 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255

NETWORK ADDRESS WITH SLASH :

A : 8 bits of Network and 24 bits of hosts. 10.0.0.0/8

B : 16 bits of Network and 16 bits of hosts. 128.196.0.0/16

C : 24 bits of Network and 8 bits of hosts. 192.245.12.0 /24

When You plan for sub-netting, always remember one thing the Power of 2.

Why Subnetting is required?

The basic idea is that if you have an excessive amount of traffic flowing across your network, then those traffic can cause your network to run slowly. When you subnet  the network, you are splitting the network into a separate, but interconnected network. That way, most of the network traffic will be isolated to the subnet in which it originated.

-DR