Just like military powers fear an invasion from the enemies outside their point of control, big organizations and companies also face similar kinds of challenges when it comes to cybersecurity. A demilitarized zone in a political and geographical scenario means a piece of land where states that are on the opposite side of each other (usually the neighbors) cannot perform any kind of operations including setting up camps and establishing military bases.
In simple words, this demilitarized zone is the no man’s land or buffer zone where the agreement of isolation has been enforced and in computing, it is known by many names likes Perimeter Network, Screened Subnet and most famously, a DM Zone (DMZ). It is an organization’s defense against cybercriminals who want to get inside their system without an invitation and works the same way in providing an additional layer of security to them just like a no man’s land. Technically it is a subnetwork that is placed between the Local Area Network (LAN) and the Internet.
Also read…
As you perhaps already know that the LAN is in many cases is a private network that contains sensitive information of an organization and the internet is the hub where cybercriminals like hackers find a safe space to carry out cyber-attacks. So the organization put non-sensitive data (including resources and External Facing Servers) into the DMZ Zone which will be accessible to the internet and behind that they put on firewalls for their security, which is one of the rarest forms of cybersecurity that can give you guaranteed protection against the cybercrimes.
External nodes that are part of the internet cannot get through the firewall which leaves hackers restricted out of the internal data which is exactly what they came for and need to access. Hence, the LAN is safe and secure.
The need for security doesn’t stop at the LAN because it only contains the personal data of the organization which is only accessible to the employees and the people involved in the business with them.
Securing the LAN is only step number one in the process. Unsecured DMZ still needed to be secured because this is where the interaction with customers (namely end-users) takes place.
DMZ includes some of the vital servers like web, proxy, email and essential services like Domain Name System (DNS), File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Voice over IP (VoIP).
Download What is DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) ? in pdf – Click here