– 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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Most ‘normal’ corporations have both a public address, so employees can connect to the internet, and a completely private, unconnected (to internet) control network, for machines, PLC’s, etc.
You make it sound like the dark web 2.0 for evil corporations.
There’s not one common network all the companies operate on, each company has a bunch of their own stuff only they can access, similar to how you have a personal network in your home so you can connect your phone to the TV and play music.
My companies internal network has a bunch of company specific info e.g. org chart showing everyone’s job, plus holiday booking software, objectives, expense claims, benefits, payroll etc. It’s extremely boring.
What about internet 2, which is like an invite only internet that is mainly used by universities to allow them to transfer massive data sets between eachother. Everyone talking about intranet but i don’t think that’s what they are looking for
http://www.ijcse.com/docs/IJCSE10-01-03-17.pdf
There is a network called internet2 lol, it’s basically just really high low latency fiber between academic and research facilities. Some corps like IBM are on it as well.
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.
They basically set up a mini internet for all their work computers to run on that has no/limited access to the regular internet. It’s mostly a security thing, someone would have to physically access atleast part of this network to do anything nefarious like steal company secrets or employee information etc, and if combined with stuff like good physical security and training employees in good security practices this can be very difficult to accomplish.
Surprised by the answers here… the MPLS answers are correct.
If you want a specific case-in-point, at my company, we pay for a private connection directly into the back-end of our AWS VPC. (A fancy way of saying we’ve got our own fiber connection directly into Amazon).
Lots of companies do stuff like this to DIRECTLY connect their shit to other people’s shit, so that it’s faster, and doesn’t have the reliability problems of the internet.
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.
I’m on the secondary internet. What, y’all aren’t on here? Too bad- Its pretty sweet.
Think of this as roads
The internet is all the public roads. They connect all houses and business etc and you can take a short or long route due to capacity.
Then you have intranet. (Note the spelling) this is all the roads in my ranch. Just for me the boss of MegaCorp and my friends and employees. Still a road network, but you’re not allowed access cos it’s on my land. Also called Local Area Network.
Then you have MegaCorp with their private road between their two sites. Still a road. Not just in my ranch, and to all intents and purposes still a part of the public road network, but I pay extra to keep the public off it so it’s faster for me. I might even have paid for it myself. In real life, this can sometimes be a [microwave link between buildings ](https://www.cablefree.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Cablefree-Microwave-Link-10.jpg)
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