Embedded system
termnetworkingIT support
A computer built into something that is not thought of as a computer, with a fixed job and usually nobody watching it.
Almost every device on a network is one: the switch, the access point, the power distribution unit, the camera, the building's air handling. What makes them an operational category rather than a hardware one is the assumptions they carry - long service lives, patching that requires an outage, credentials that were set once, and vendors who may not exist by the time a vulnerability is published. An estate's real attack surface is usually not the servers somebody maintains; it is the several hundred small computers nobody has logged into since installation.
Also known as: embedded systems, embedded device