1. In 2003, a well-publicized report from IT analyst firm Gartner predicted that the market for stand-alone IDS tools would soon disappear, and urged Gartner clients to cease investing in IDS tools in favor of firewalls. Clearly, the obsolescence of IDS tools by 2005 did not occur as Gartner predicted, due in part to significant increases in the technological capability, processing speed, and accuracy of IDS tools in the nearly 10 years since the erroneous prediction.

Contemporary enterprises have a wide array of network and platform security tools from which to choose, and as we have seen in this course there is substantial overlap in the capabilities of different categories of tools such as firewalls, IDS, anti-malware, vulnerability scanners, and so forth. What factors would exert the most influence on an organization and lead it to choose to implement IDS? In your response please identify potential benefits of IDS, potential drawbacks, and any considerations about an organization's operating environment that might drive its decision.