Home | Support

IT Glossary of Terms

DNS – Domain Naming System

Since IP addresses are difficult to remember, most networks use DNS servers to translate names to IP Addresses. Reverse DNS is also becoming an important security screening tool. Reverse DNS translates IP Addresses to names.

Email Server

A relatively large computer system that handles email for organizations and end users. ISPs typically host email for individual home users and small organizations. Larger organizations tend to operate their own in-house email servers.

Firewall

A firewall protects an organization’s internal network from intrusion across the Internet.

IP Address

Roughly analogous to a street address in the physical world. An IP Address is a number that (more or less) uniquely identifies everything connected to a TCP/IP network. ISPs assign IP Address ranges to organizations.

ISP – Internet Service Provider.

ISPs connect organizations and individual users to the Internet. Qwest, Comcast, and Time Warner are ISPs, in addition to being phone and cable TV companies.

Microsoft Exchange, or just Exchange

Microsoft’s email server software product.

TCP/IP

The set of communication protocols that define the Internet. By now, the Internet connects nearly every organization in the world to nearly every other organization in the world. Most organizations also use TCP/IP in their own in-house networks.

VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol

VoIP is the routing of voice conversations over the Internet or another IP-based network.  VoIP is one of the services offered by InfraSupport.