Sun Java Communications Suite 5 Deployment Planning Guide

Intranet

The DMZ provides a network segment for hosts that offer services to the Internet. This design protects your internal hosts, as they do not reside on the same segment as hosts that could be compromised by an external attack. Internally, you also have similar services to offer (Web, mail, file serving, internal DNS, and so on) that are meant solely for internal users. Just as the Internet services are segmented, so too, are the internal services. Separation of services in this manner also permits tighter controls to be placed on the router filtering.

Just as you separate the Internet-facing services into the DMZ for security, your private internal services should reside in their own internal DMZ. In addition, just as multiple DMZs can be beneficial—depending on your services and your network’s size—multiple intranets might also be helpful.

The firewall rules providing the segmentation should be configured similarly to the rules used for the DMZ’s firewall. Inbound traffic should come solely from machines relaying information from the DMZ (such as inbound email being passed to internal mail servers) and machines residing on the internal network.