It is a lot different in the digital world; while email id replaces the name, email domains represent your organizational affiliations; with a gmail.com or yahoo.com reflecting an individuals’ personal email id. But what is the equivalent of the physical address in the digital world? Is it IP Address; IP standing for Internet Protocol.
The answer is both yes and no. Yes, as the network you are in is recognized by its IP Address in the digital world and the computer within the network is recognised by another unique number assigned by the network. This is not very different from the telephone numbers that are assigned to an organization or household, with the individuals in the organization or household having an “extension number”. Just as large organizations have multiple phone numbers, here too, they can have multiple IP Addresses.
One major difference between the IP Address and the telephone-extension number analogy is in the fluid
1 The 8-bit number set is the IPv4 (IP version 4). To accommodate the increasing number of devices, IPv6 with state of the numbers assigned within the network which can change every time a user exits and reenters the network. Further, there is no need for the user to remember their IP Address, as the computer and network devices are programmed to generate the required IP Addresses and remember it as well.
Given its unique and distinctive role, it is good to know how an IP Address is represented and how it works.
IP Address
To access the internet for your emails and other information that you seek, your computer first connects to a network and through it connects to other networks in the Internet. That network at home might be your telecom company which is your Internet Service Provider (ISP), or a corporate network for individuals working in medium to large companies or a public wireless network at an airport or a hotel or coffee shop when you’re on the move.
To ensure seamless and smooth access to your email and data, your computer’s networking software is programmed to follow a protocol, or an order /
sequence in which data is transferred to the internet for swapping information back and forth, which is called the Internet Protocol. Each computer has its own IP Address that is represented by a string of numbers. Written as four number sets separated by period, in “dotted decimal” notation, each set in its binary equivalent, represented by an 8-bit number ranging from (0-255)1
Hence IP Addresses are number sets ranging from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255. However, certain numbers from this set are blocked for general use by
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) as they are reserved for special purposes.
The relationship between website names and IP Address is interesting. Hosts on the Internet are usually known by names, e.g., www.cimplyfive.com, and not primarily by their IP address, which is used for routing and network interface identification. The use of domain names requires translating them, (called resolving) to IP addresses and vice versa. This is like looking up a phone number in a phone book using the recipient’s name. The translation between
16 number sets is now being adopted and the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is in underway.
addresses and domain names is performed by the Domain Name System (DNS).
For Company Secretaries
Company Secretaries deal with confidential information that they need to protect and hence when they use the internet, they need to ensure that their data is safe and secure. They can assure themselves by ensuring that the website with which they are sharing information is encrypting their data when it is transported across the internet. This can be assured when the website with which they share their data has a security certificate, which is displayed by the website using the acronym ‘https’, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. For example, https://cimplyfive.com. In contrast, where the website only uses http://, the data sent and received from them are not encrypted and therefore unsecure. Unencrypted transmission of data over internet is vulnerable as it can be “stolen” by hackers, just like a careless traveler’s pocket is picked by a criminal. Pick pocket of the real world is called “Man in the Middle attack” in the digital world, and it is more dangerous in the digital world as the victim does not even know that they have been robbed as they receive their information compromised.
Given this, our advice to all Company Secretaries, please ensure that you transmit sensitive data only to websites having https security certification, otherwise your “pocket” is likely to be “picked”. Further in designing BLISS and its variants, our secretarial automation software, we have provided a feature where the company secretaries can restrict the access to their secretarial record to any of the users by restricting its access to their office network by specifying a given IP Address or a set of IP Address thereby ensuring that their secretarial records cannot be accessed outside their office or the defined IP Addresses.
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