– A friend of mine in IT is always talking about the “secondary” or “private” internet network that big name corporations operate on, outside of “normal internet” traffic. What is this network, and how is it accessed?
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Private networks are just networks that are not connected to the rest of the world. Even your modem and PC in your own house is a private network.
The word you’re looking for is intranet. Many private companies host their own internal websites for use by employees that only exists on their internal network, or intranet.
You access by being in the building usually. Some offer remote ways to connect by using programs called VPN clients.
Depending upon the kind of work the company does, the private network may be air gapped and only if you are on premises can you access it.
On a home scale, a private network is filled with addresses that mean nothing when used in public. A jar of cookies (shared drive) might be next to the fridge, but telling someone downtown that there’s cookies next to the fridge doesn’t do anything. They would need access to your house first.
For some instances, businesses have physical hardware inside the buildings they own that just talk to one another, a small internet within their walls. If you pay enough money you can have cables run, beam long range wifi etc. And include multiple buildings to this physically separated private network. To gain access to these, you need to be in their buildings.
But that’s old and people want to work from home, they want to be at the office virtually. Businesses will issue specific Virtual Private Network programs/settings to enable people from anywhere with internet to be treated like they’re on site, with access to the fridge and all the cookies next to it.
Do you mean an INTRAnet?
This is just an internal network for a company.
What this means is that for computers in an intranet they are essentially “automatically” trusted. This means that the data/files that gets transferred between the different computers within the network doesn’t need to be checked. This is because the data is either created within the network or checked whilst entering.
The internet is the method in which multiple separate networks connect to each other. For security reasons, each byte of information that is transferred between these networks must be checked to ensure the integrity of each individual network (intranet).
Private networks are just networks that aren’t connected to the public internet. They’re usually called intranets and there are a lot of different subtypes. You probably have an intranet called a LAN or local area network in your house that consists of the devices connected to your router.
The internet as a whole connects people from all over the world, to each other and to websites. It works by letting people download files from faraway servers to their devices. (Websites are made from files, your device just knows to automatically download and display them rather than saving them in a folder.)
Some companies have private files that they want to share with employees, but not the whole world. They can create a private network, and make the files only available to people connected to that network. For example when you go to a business and they have a no-password wifi network called “company_customers” and another password protected one called “company_official,” the second one is the private network. You access it like regular wifi, you just need the password.
The way the question is phrased makes it sound like you might have a misconception. There is not “the” secondary private internet. There are many private internets- people at home may have a password-protected wifi network so their neighbors can’t access, say, their wireless printer. Company wifi networks are the same.
Well, the real private internet is the same private network you have in your home, and utilizes the exact same mechanisms that enterprises use to make their corporate network accessible to employees, but not the general public. There are two primary components of this filter, if you will, that permits your network to be private. First, a firewall. This is a device which inspects traffic going through it and either permits or denies traffic based on policy. For your home network, it’s likely very simple: Incoming traffic? No. Outgoing traffic? Yes.
The second component is a non-exclusive, private address space, which is technically referred to as IANA reserved IP space. The acronym stands for Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, and is the body responsible for allocating IP addresses to specific uses or regions. The IANA has reserved three chunks of IP version 4 addressses for private use, that is to say, everyone can map them in their own private network, with the assurance that they’ll never be used for a public resource.
You will know whether you’re on a private network if your IP address falls within the following IP address ranges:
10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255
172.16.0.0 – 172.31.255.255
192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255
In order to make your private IP space able to access the internet, that firewall I mentioned before needs another feature, called Network Address Translation, which maps your private IP addresses to a non-reserved Public IP address which can be routed over the regular internet.
They are probably talking about MPLS type networks where companies rent access to fibre cabling to run private networks between their offices/data centers
It’s sometimes private cables, sometimes guaranteed segmented bandwidth on shared cables
By design it’s not accessible from the internet and is designed for reliable and relatively secure networking between sites
you can think of
“normal internet” or “interconnected computer networks” as a mesh of roads/highways
“private networks” would then be roads in a gated community, to access those you get controlled.
“intranet” refers to the service provided in that gated community
“extranet” to services provided by that gated community to outsiders
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