Corporate Intranet

Companies and other large institutions will usually have some services (email, web, and access to files and printers for instance) that are accessible from within their own local network, but not from outside on the wider Internet. Most companies take this as being sufficient security to protect their internal documents, but this means that any attack that can connect to the intranet can access or interfere with all the information being kept locally. An example of such an attack is tricking an employee to install malware on their laptop.

To allow employees to access the intranet via the wider Internet, companies will often provide their own Virtual Private Network (VPN) which creates a secure connection to the inside of the intranet from anywhere in the world.