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An IT shortcut: Acronyms, explained PDQ

By Henry B. Chace

We live in a world of acronyms and shortcuts. The world of IT (information technology) is awash in a sea of lettered abbreviations of definitions, many of which you may not want to know. But when so much of your business relies on technology, it might be a good idea to have some general definitions available. I present to you some technology-related acronyms and shortcuts to definitions you should know. This is, of course, not a comprehensive list.

ASP (for application service provider) – a business that can provide to you all or part of your applications, including e-mail, document management, back-office server administration, usually by way of a direct link or via the World Wide Web, also known as the Internet;

Bandwidth – the range of transmission frequencies that a network can use; the greater the bandwidth, the greater the amount of information that can travel on the network at one time;

Cookie – small bits of data that a Web page stores on a user’s computer, either in RAM (random access memory) or on the hard drive; can keep track of your movements on a Web site and is a way to customize content based on a user’s past preferences; cannot be used to “see” any other data on your computer, nor will they determine your e-mail address or identity;

DMS (for document management system) – a technology that allows you to profile documents, spreadsheets and other file content and search easily on various fields, such as author, title, client/matter number; see also ECM (for enterprise content management);

DNS (for domain name system) – a distributed Internet directory service; used mostly to translate between domain names and IP addresses and to control e-mail delivery; most Internet services rely on DNS to work, and if it fails or is too slow, Web sites cannot be located and e-mail delivery stalls;

ECM (for enterprise content management) – the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver content and documents related to organizational pro-cesses; ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information exists; see also DMS;

HTML (for hyper text markup language) – the language/ code used to create Web pages; not really a programming language but a way to format text by placing marks around the text; the foundation for most Web pages;

HTTP (for hyper text transfer protocol) – the protocol by which Web pages are transferred on the Internet; tells computers how to communicate with each other; most Web page locations begin with http://; if followed by an “s” as in https://, it indicates a site that has security.

IP address (for Internet Protocol address) – a unique address that certain electronic devices currently use to identify and communicate with each other on a computer network utilizing the Internet Protocol standard (IP); in simpler terms, a computer address;

ISP (for Internet service provider) – the company from which you get Internet access;

KM (for knowledge management) – comprises a range of practices used by organizations to identify, create, represent and distribute knowledge;

LAN (for local area network) – a group of computers interconnected to share information and various functions;

RAID (for redundant arrays of independent disks) – an umbrella term for computer data-storage schemes that divide and replicate data among multiple hard disk drives; its various designs balance or accentuate two key design goals: increased data reliability and increased I/O (input/output) performance;

SaaS (for software as a service) – a software-application delivery model where a software vendor develops a Web-native software application and hosts and operates (either independently or through a third party) the application for use by its customers over the Internet; customers pay only for using the software, not owning it; and

WAN (for wide area network) – a group of LANs (local area networks) connected over a wide area.

This is just a very small part of networking IT terminology. Much like the legal profession, IT has its own language and definitions. And now that you have the Internet, Google and this list, you will always be able to find out what those crazy IT folks are talking about.

Henry B. Chace is chief information officer at the firm of Burns & Levinson in Boston.

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