A corporate area network (CAN) is a separate, protected portion of a corporation's intranet. When people are on the corporate area network, they are sometimes said to be in the CAN: they do not have access to the Internet -- or to the rest of the corporate network, for that matter. Users may be connected directly, for example in a token ring configuration, or may be geographically dispersed and connected by backbone lines.
CAN is sometimes said to stand for campus area network, where it refers to an interconnection of local area networks (LANs) that are geographically dispersed more widely than in a LAN, but less so than in a wide area network (WAN).
Contributor(s): Douglas Spindler
This was last updated in September 2003