IT and security glossary.
Plain-language definitions of the IT, security, and cloud terms used across our services and industry documentation.
Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations — the use of AI and machine learning to automate and enhance IT operations including event correlation and anomaly detection.
Business Continuity Plan — a documented strategy for maintaining and restoring business operations following a disruption or disaster.
Configuration Management Database — a repository that stores information about hardware and software assets in an IT environment.
A set of practices combining software development and IT operations to shorten development cycles and provide continuous delivery.
Endpoint Detection and Response — security software that monitors endpoint devices for threats and enables rapid response to security incidents.
Financial Operations for cloud — a practice combining financial management with cloud technology to help organisations maximise business value from cloud spending.
Infrastructure as Code — the practice of managing and provisioning IT infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files rather than manual processes.
Identity and Access Management — the framework of policies and technologies for ensuring that the right people access the right resources at the right times.
IT Service Management — a set of policies and practices for implementing, delivering, and managing IT services to meet the needs of an organisation.
Multi-Factor Authentication — a security process requiring users to provide two or more verification factors to gain access to a system.
Mean Time Between Failures — the average time a system operates between failures, used as a measure of reliability.
Mean Time to Resolve — the average time it takes to restore a failed service or component after a fault is detected.
Network Operations Center — a centralised team that monitors, manages, and maintains network infrastructure to ensure availability and performance.
Role-Based Access Control — an access control method where permissions are assigned to roles rather than individuals, and users are assigned to roles.
Recovery Point Objective — the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time, defining how far back data recovery must reach.
Recovery Time Objective — the maximum acceptable length of time that a system or application can be offline after a failure before it causes unacceptable business impact.
Security Information and Event Management — a platform that collects, analyses, and correlates security events from across an IT environment.
Service Level Agreement — a contractual commitment defining the expected performance, availability, and response times for a service.
Security Operations Center — a team that monitors and defends an organisation against cyber threats through continuous security event monitoring and incident response.
A security model that requires all users, devices, and systems to be continuously verified before being granted access to resources, regardless of network location.