Front cover - IBM Redbooks

1.1 Introduction
4 Lotus Security Handbook
The business world as we know it has evolved rapidly over the years and through
this evolution, so has the way companies do business. As we find ourselves in
this new era, it is thanks to a number of important revolutions that occurred in the
previous two decades.
The first revolution occurred in the early 1980s with the advent of the IBM
Personal Computer, which was the first true business microcomputer on the
market. It permitted companies and individuals alike to have access to computing
resources which were relatively inexpensive for their times. Connecting these
machines through a local network enabled the flow of information like never
before and brought forth the notion of distributed computing. This lead to an
explosion of business solutions that changed significantly the way businesses
operated.
The second revolution occurred in the mid 1990s, with the marriage of what was
then a twenty year old collection of networks (called the Internet, originally
named ARPANet) with the Web browser. This marriage made it finally easy to
access information on the Internet. This was the genesis of e-Business. With the
help of Web servers and a standard set of Web technologies, organizations
could now offer a plethora of services and goods over the Internet. These same
organizations found also that they could better communicate and exchange
information with their suppliers. As well, by carefully opening up their internal
networks to the Internet, these organizations could permit employees to access
data and electronic mail from their personal homes, or, even more importantly,
from anywhere in the world their employees happened to be, whether at remote
locations or while on the road.
1.1.1 Knowledge capital
In this new age of e-Business, information has become an important commodity.
It is correctly referred to as knowledge capital, which is a form of capital many
businesses depend on the same way they do on their monetary capital. As a
matter of fact, businesses live and die by the measure of control they have over
their knowledge capital. If this capital is stolen, disclosed, corrupted, or
destroyed, a company can suffer greatly—even to the point of losing its
existence.
There are individuals who make it their purpose in life to get unauthorized access
to computer networks, systems, and the information they store and disseminate.
In the more benign form, these individuals do it for the sheer thrill of it, to boast of
their mastery of computer sciences and nothing more (they are usually referred
to as white hat hackers). In worse forms, these individuals do it for malicious