Glossary
The terms we use, in plain English
If a quote or a support call uses a word you don't know, it's in here. Search below — and if we ever use jargon on you, say so. We'll explain properly.
- AI (Artificial Intelligence)
- Software that performs tasks usually needing human judgement — for us, mostly practical things like ticket triage, document processing and knowledge search.
- Bandwidth
- The data-carrying capacity of your internet connection, measured in megabits per second (Mbps). More bandwidth helps multiple users and devices, but latency matters more for video calls and gaming.
- Backup
- A copy of your data stored separately from the original, so you can restore it after failure, ransomware or accident. An untested backup is a hope, not a backup.
- Cloud services
- Computing, storage and software delivered over the internet (e.g. Microsoft 365, AWS) instead of from a physical server in your building.
- DNS
- The internet's address book — it translates names like zeeflex.com.au into the numbers devices use to find them.
- DMARC
- An email authentication record (alongside SPF and DKIM) that tells receiving mail servers what to do when an email claims to be from your domain but isn't verified.
- DDoS attack
- An attack that overwhelms a service with traffic until it stops responding. Mitigated upstream and with filtering; one of the things managed monitoring catches early.
- Endpoint
- Any device that connects to your network and holds data: PCs, laptops, phones, printers, cameras. Endpoint security is protection on each of them.
- Essential Eight
- The Australian Cyber Security Centre's eight mitigations that block the majority of known intrusion techniques, rated in maturity levels 1–8.
- Firewall
- A network gatekeeper that decides which traffic is allowed through — between your network and the internet, or between zones inside your network.
- Immutable backup
- A backup that cannot be altered or deleted for a set period — the key defence against ransomware deleting your safety net.
- MFA / Multi-Factor Authentication
- Requiring two or more proofs of identity to sign in (e.g. password plus an authenticator app). MFA stops the vast majority of account-takeover attacks.
- NAS
- Network-Attached Storage — a dedicated device on your network for shared files and backups, often with RAID protection.
- Patch management
- The ongoing process of finding, testing and applying software updates that fix security holes and bugs. One of the highest-ROI activities in IT.
- RAID
- A way of combining multiple drives for redundancy (or speed). RAID protects against drive failure, not against deletion, corruption or ransomware — it is not a backup.
- Ransomware
- Malware that encrypts your files and demands payment for the key. Prevention (backups, patching, MFA) matters far more than negotiating.
- RTO / RPO
- Recovery Time Objective: how quickly you must be back. Recovery Point Objective: how much data loss (in time) you can accept. Both are core to a disaster recovery plan.
- SLA
- Service Level Agreement — the written commitments on response and resolution times, with defined priorities. Ours is on the SLA page.
- SPF
- Sender Policy Framework — an email record listing which servers may send mail for your domain. First of the three big email-authentication records.
- DKIM
- DomainKeys Identified Mail — a cryptographic signature added to your outgoing emails proving they came from your domain and weren't tampered with.
- Switch
- The hardware that connects devices on your local network. Managed switches add control: separate networks (VLANs), monitoring and power over Ethernet.
- Threat actor
- The person or group behind an attack — from opportunistic script kiddies to organised, financially-motivated crews targeting small business.
- VPN
- A secure encrypted tunnel over the internet, used to connect remote staff or sites to your network as if they were physically there.
- Wi-Fi 6
- The current generation of Wi-Fi — faster, more efficient and better at handling many simultaneous devices than the Wi-Fi 5 most offices still run.