The Data Protection Act was made to control how personal, or customer information is used by organisations or governmentbodies to protect people’s privacy and lays down rules about how data about people can be used. All this means is that if there is any private information about someone in or out of an organisation it should be secured. The information this protects strongly are political opinions, religious beliefs, criminal history and health. As an organisation, they will be handling the personal information of your employees, suppliers and customers.
A client server network is a network of devices that are all connected to a main server which stores data and controls user access.
Organisations commonly use client-server networks to allocate and manage recourse. Network sharing enables access to information by more than one person through more than one device at the same or at different times, this is because there is a central server connecting the devices. So, for example, if they wanted to install an anti-virus software instead of installing it individually, they will just send it to all the devices that are connected through the server.
Advantages of using a client server network are that it is easier to manage and has a centralised administration.
Disadvantages of using a client server network is that it is expensive to keep running and viruses can be spread easily throughout the network.
A peer-to-peer network is two or more computers connected to each other without the help of a server that share resources.
On a peer-to-peer network not all resources are shared, for example if a printer is connected to a device, other devices can’t access it unless they go to the device it is connected to and use it there.
Advantages of a peer-to-peer network is that it is very cost efficient and does not require a lot of resources to manage.
Disadvantages of a peer-to-peer network is that it is not good for a large-scale network and if one of the computers goes down the whole network goes down with it.
