The internet is the single most important technological advancement to take place during my lifetime and now is such an integral part of our daily lives we can not even imagine living without. The technology used to access the World Wide Web continually evolves and advances at unprecedented rates. The tools and gadgets we use to access the internet improve continuously and by the time we purchase the latest internet technology tool, a newer and faster version has already been developed and released on the market. The internet has become an integral part of the daily routines and operations of businesses worldwide. As businesses grow and expand based on the use of internet technologies, there are considerations that need to be made based on the infrastructure of the internet and employees use of computers. This paper will focus on those considerations of internet technologies and take a look at the vulnerabilities and lost production businesses are susceptible to with online operations and what is needed overcome and minimize these vulnerabilities and losses.
Before the term internet existed a group of scientists and engineers for the U.S. Department of Defense transferred the first packets of data in the late 1960’s. Over the following two decades the speed and reliability increased as more universities and government researchers joined the network. In 1990, the U.S. Department of Defense ended its support of the internet when congress passed the Gore Bill handing control over to The National Science Foundation. Just 23 years after the first computers were linked together the “internet had over one million hosts, computers are nine orders of magnitude faster and network bandwidth is twenty million times greater.” By 1995 the National Science Foundation ceased operations and the internet was then controlled and run commercially. During the last 16 years