A demilitarized zone (DMZ) is a physical or logical subnetwork that contains and exposes external services of an organization to a larger network, usually the Internet. The purpose of a DMZ is to add an additional layer of security to an organization's Local Area Network (LAN); an external attacker only has access to equipment in the DMZ, rather than the whole of the network. Hosts in the DMZ have limited connectivity to specific hosts in the internal network, though communication with other hosts in the DMZ and to the external network is allowed.
This allows hosts in the DMZ to provide services to both the internal and external networks, while an intervening firewall controls the traffic between the DMZ servers and the internal network clients. In a DMZ configuration, most computers on the LAN run behind a firewall connected to a public network such as the Internet.