A recent topic of interest in the industry is the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS).

A recent topic of interest in the industry is the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). Many vendors have created enhancements to IDS systems to make them into IPSs. Look into current developments in this area.  What did you find of interest?  Why?

At first the two terms, IPS and IDS had all most the same meaning but as I did deep on the internet research, it was obvious that both of them are functionality at different levels of a network. The IPS is almost like a firewall that is present at the network gateway and is responsible to allow or disallow data packets based on the set of rules installed by the network administrator. On the other hand IDS is just like a protocol analyzer. It is present at every level and monitors the data packets for threats.

In my opinion both are important aspects of a computer network security system. I am not sure about how they will impact the overall resources utilization of a network if both of them are installed at the same time.