Intrusion Prevention Systems in the spotlight

Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) are starting to attract the interest of IT managers at all levels, largely thanks to their innate ability to enforce company security policies and, of course, help stop attacks on an organization’s IT resources in real time. But how do they compare to Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and are they effective?

To the casual observer, intrusion prevention and intrusion detection systems look quite alike. Both IT security systems examine traffic flowing in and out of a network, essentially looking for things that don’t belong.