At first glance, the heading of this column might appear as a contradiction of terms. After all, any network manager or administrator that has experienced the joys associated with connecting a corporate network to the Internet while providing a sufficient level of security knows this task is anything but trivial, typically requiring the installation of dual stacks on workstations and the coding of templates to make firewalls correctly provide a desired level of security.
Although correctly connecting to the Internet is no trivial task, once accomplished, you gain access to a literal wealth of information that can provide answers to numerous network-related problems, as well as facilitate the performance of many network-related tasks. Through the use of Archie, Jughead, and Veronica, as well as World Wide Web search engines such as Lycos and the Web Crawler, you can rapidly search for a variety of network-related information. You can quickly locate information ranging in scope from the latest driver for a specific adapter card to the status of RFCs, as well as their full-text contents, to wide area network tariffs, product comparisons, and similar information. Thus, the Internet represents a valuable tool too often overlooked that can be used to fight the complexity associated with rapidly evolving technology. Due to this, we should view the Internet not only from the corporate perspective as a mechanism to promote products or sell merchandise but also as a resource that can provide answers to a variety of questions. Thus, a connection to the Internet should be viewed as a valuable resource. However, as with most technologies, the effective use of the Internet to locate information requires employees to master the use of a new set of tools.
Since many network managers, administrators, and staff have a considerable experience in the use of search tools, we should consider sharing that experience with other parts of the organization either via memorandums and hands-on classes or informal support. By doing so we can share our knowledge with other employees, as well as make other areas of our organization aware of resources they can readily access via a click of a mouse. Once other departments realize the value of information that can be obtained via communications, our yearly budget requests may take on a new meaning. Thus, promoting the Internet as a mechanism to fight complexity can be a valuable mechanism to make other departments aware of the value of our budget requests-a win-win situation. As my Macon TV announcer would say: 'That's my opinion-what's yours?' -Gilbert Held