The Power of Network Intelligence

Forbes CIO Magazine ran an interesting article recently titled "Networks aren't just Data Highways" - lamenting the tremendous untapped compute power of the Internet's underlying infrastructure of routers, switches, firewalls, LBs, etc. Since all enterprise relevant information (email, CRM and ERP entries, etc) flows through the network, this is the one place where all data meet

Dan Woods predicts a development of the network towards an integral part of the application with the following tasks:

• value added functionality (auditing, monitoring)
  
• policy compliance monitoring (products by SAP, Cisco)
• prevention of information leaks, intrusion detection
  
• event mining for business intelligence purpose
• devices with intelligence can act as event sources (GPS, RFID, WLAN hubs, user presence, smartcard readers, cameras, etc.)