– 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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Imagine a busy restaurant. You don’t want customers just wandering into the kitchen, and you don’t even want servers wandering into the kitchen and messing up the order of the orders.
So, you build a passthrough. The servers walk up to the window, put in their orders, collect filled plates, and at a separate window they pass stuff to the dishwashers and collect new utensils.
The cooks are walking around their own space, the dishwashers have their own space, and the public is kept out.
Similarly, a lot of companies have a private internal network that can only get to the public internet via some sort of controlled access. If they are really fancy there may even be websites and applications that can only be reached from the inside, not the outside. The common name for this is an Intranet.
If the company operates in multiple places there may be dedicated lines (these used to be leased from phone companies, back in the long ago) that are used to provide fast secure communication, otherwise there’s a lot of security stuff that can be used to make 30 offices and data centers around the world look like one nice integrated safe network.
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