– 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?

Question

– 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?

In: 4244

Answer 1

Some people have given you some great answers on the difference between the public and internal, intranet. Intranet being essentially the segmented network not directly accessible from the outside.

There’s also a little more nuisance, in many big tech environments that intranet is also split into several control planes, one intranet called “corp” and one intranet called “prod” (production).

Think of corp as the corporate machines used by people, desktops, laptops, printers and the like. All these run in their own segment of the intranet. Prod (production) is the network that has “production” machines like webservers, mail servers, application servers, etc. Some of these are publicly accessible and in many cases where proper segmentation is done, corp machines cannot directly access prod and further authentication is needed to be able to access it.