Abstract

During the 1980s, organizations began to install local area networks to connect computers in departments and workgroups. Department-level managers usually made decisions about what type of computers and networks they wanted to install.Eventually, organizations saw benefits in building enterprise networks that would let people throughout the organization exchange e-mail and work together using collaborative software. An enterprise network would connect all the isolated departmental or workgroup networks into an intracompany network, with the potential for allowing all computer users in a company to access any data or computing resource. An enterprise network is both local and wide area in scope. It integrates all the systems within an organization, whether they are Windows computers, Apple Macintoshes, UNIX workstations, minicomputers, or mainframes.An enterprise network can be thought of as a "plug-and-play" platform for connecting many different computing devices. In this platform scenario, no user or group is an island. All systems can potentially communicate with all other systems while maintaining reasonable performance, security, and reliability.