Cybersecurity: What differentiates Routers from Switches

Technology has come a long way from the way it used to be. This has also impacted the growth of computers, as computers have gone from occupying blocks of rooms to being portable in this age. Computers are carried around in today’s age without stress or discomfort. Gone are the days when it took three hefty men to carry a 10-megabyte hard disk to now when a smartphone might have up to 500 gig ram as its storage device. The growth in technology and the computer industry has been breathtaking.

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In the same vein, computer devices have grown. This has seen how network structures are connected, and the network devices continue to change over time due to continuous improvement and innovation. Among the earliest network devices are Hubs; it performs almost similar functions to switches, but switches are smarter than hubs. Hubs are used for communication within a system. However, hubs is not smart enough to direct information to just one device in a system, instead, it sends information to all the computer systems in a network. Hubs seem to be in extinction in most modern organisations.

The two network devices that are still being rampantly used are Switches and Routers. The switch and Routers help with the communication of information. However, routers are far superior when compared to Switches. Remember that switches are used to switch or transfer information in packets within computers connected to a network. However, Routers are used to route or transfer information between different networks. So the difference between them both is that Routers route packets between networks while Switch route packets between computerss on the same network.

Routers are part of layer 3 in the OSI model and tend to incorporate a lot. It is one device that allows for the interconnectedness of networks through one component called network address Translation (NAT). This NAT helps translate the Private IP address used in an organization into a readable Network IP address. This may sound complicated, but the biggest takeaway is that Routers could be located in many places on the network. Still, if an organization wants to communicate over the internet, they must have a Router located at the Internet gateway of the organization.

Routers ensure that information sourced over the internet gets to the Ip address which had requested for it. As I said, it routes packets between networks, and this way, it is one of the most vital network devices to this day.