IT standards and organizations

Terms related to information technology (IT) standards, including definitions about IT organizations and words and phrases about policies and compliance.
  • What is SSH (Secure Shell) and How Does It Work? - SSH (Secure Shell or Secure Socket Shell) is a network protocol that gives users -- particularly systems administrators -- a secure way to access a computer over an unsecured network.
  • What is SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)? - SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a networking protocol that secures connections between web clients and web servers over internal networks or the internet by encrypting the data sent between those clients and servers.
  • What is TCP/IP? - TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol and is a suite of communication protocols used to interconnect network devices on the internet.
  • What is the 11th dimension in M-theory? - The 11th dimension is a characteristic of spacetime that has been proposed as a possible answer to questions that arise in superstring theory.
  • What is the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA)? - The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) allows United States government agencies and non-government entities to share information with each other as they investigate cyberattacks.
  • What is the data link layer in the OSI model? - The data link layer is the protocol layer in a program that handles how data moves in and out of a physical link in a network.
  • What is the Driver's Privacy Protection Act (DPPA)? - The Driver's Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) is a United States federal law designed to protect the personally identifiable information of licensed drivers from improper use or disclosure.
  • What is the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA)? - The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB Act or GLBA), also known as the Financial Modernization Act of 1999, is a federal law enacted in the United States to control the ways financial institutions deal with the private information of individuals.
  • What is the NSA and how does it work? - The National Security Agency (NSA) is a federal government surveillance and intelligence agency that's part of the U.
  • What is the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol? How does it work? - The Server Message Block (SMB) protocol is a client-server communication protocol used for sharing access to files, printers, serial ports and other resources on a network.
  • What is Transport Layer Security (TLS)? - Transport Layer Security (TLS) is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard protocol that provides authentication, privacy and data integrity between two communicating computer applications.
  • Wien's constant - Wien's constant is a physical constant that is used in defining the relationship between the thermodynamic temperature of a black body (an object that radiates electromagnetic energy perfectly) and the wavelength at which the intensity of the radiation is the greatest.
  • Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) - Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is a set of specifications from Microsoft for consolidating the management of devices and applications in a network from Windows computing systems.
  • Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) - Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a specification for a set of communication protocols to standardize the way wireless devices, such as mobile phones and radio transceivers, can be used for internet access, including email, the web, newsgroups and instant messaging.
  • WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI) - WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI) is a wireless local area network security standard officially supported by the Chinese government.
  • work - Work is force applied over distance.
  • World Wide Web (WWW) - The World Wide Web -- also known as the web, WWW or W3 -- refers to all the public websites or pages that users can access on their local computers and other devices through the internet.
  • XML (Extensible Markup Language) - XML (Extensible Markup Language) is used to describe data.
  • XML Schema Definition (XSD) - XML Schema Definition or XSD is a recommendation by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to describe and validate the structure and content of an XML document.
  • yottabyte (YB) - A yottabyte (YB) is a measure of theoretical storage capacity and data volumes equal to 2 to the 80th power bytes, or approximately a million trillion megabytes (MB).
  • Zigbee - Zigbee is a standards-based wireless technology developed to enable low-cost, low-power wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) and internet of things (IoT) networks.
  • Zulu (Zulu time) - Zulu (Zulu time) is used in the military and navigation for timekeeping purposes to avert confusion when coordinating with countries using other time standards.