– 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

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.