Not many years ago personal computers used to sit alone without any kind of connection to other systems. The cost of parts and labor used to be expensive and for this reason many small business owners did not implement local area networks (LAN) also known as internal networks.

Networking is about sharing. Networking your computer systems can bring quite a few benefits to your organization. A LAN can be used to share:

• An expensive printer, scanner, plotter, or other specialized device used in your industry
• A file server where everyone within your organization is able to store in the same location different kind of files such as letters, memos, spreadsheets, pictures, graphics, and other digital archives needed to ran your company
• A backup server. When all files created by users are centrally located in a file server, as described before, a second server can be used to backup the file server. By doing this you are protecting your files should the main file server break down for any reason
• An intra-net application. This is computer software, usually custom built, that requires only a browser to be used and that is not available to any user outside your company
• Accounting software, where all customer and financial information is centrally located an accessible
• A fast Internet connection to keep Internet costs down

The list could go on, just think of what could you share within your company to make things work more efficiently.

Good networking is about not sharing too, when you don’t want to! While sharing devices and information is what makes a network, not sharing is very important as well. By the way, is very common to find internal networks where all information is shared, regardless of whether some privacy should be involved. This often happens without the administrators or users being aware of it. Some things that should not be shared, depending on the nature of your business, or that should be shared in a need to know basis only include

• Payroll and commission information
• Financial data
• Business or managers private records
• Private medical records
• Personal pictures
• Confidential plans
• Letters
• Emails
• Confidential contact lists

"Any current business owner that needs more than one computer to ran his company should have a network installed, but at the same time he must ensure that confidentiality and security are not compromised in any way"

Glossary of some common terms used in computer networking

• Ethernet is a network standard used in most of the local area networks. There are three different speeds available 10 / 100 / 1,000 Megabits per second. The higher the speed the faster the information travels through the network cable
• Category 5 cabling commonly referred to as Cat-5 cabling can transmit data at speeds up to 100 Mbps
• Category 6 cable commonly referred to as Cat-6 used in 1,000 Mbs or Gigabit Ethernet networks
• Router a network device that forwards packets from one network to another. Usually a router routes or sends information from your local network to the Internet
• IP address is a numerical identification that is assigned to each device connected to a computer network. An example of a local IP address is 192.168.100.1
• Domain Name is a unique name assigned to a computer system. This name is linked to a public IP address. It is a lot simpler for people to remember a name like ibm.com than a random IP address
• Network share is a file folder in a computer network that allows access to different users or computers in the network to store any kind of files. This share could have both read and write access to allow users to both store of delete new files as needed or read only access to view, but not changed in any way the files