Network Engineering Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for network engineers. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Once I have heard from a professional that multicast is forbidden (or not suggested or not allowed) in enterprise networks from 2014. (He referenced to a standard or recommendation document or something else. I don't remember that reference) I have searched this on the internet, but nothing found which states something about multicat allowance in enterprise networks.
Does anybody know something about multicast in enterprise networks?
Blocking multicast (in general or partially) is a network design and security decision that each enterprise needs to make for their own. There is no standard that prohibits multicast generally.
Multicast can greatly increase the efficiency of your network when there are flows than can be mapped. It is quite possible to have a high security level even when multicast is used. Of course, when used without network restrictions multicast can be used to bypass other filters. As with other techniques, if you allow multicast you need to do it in a controlled fashion.
With IPv6 multicast support is mandatory, (somewhat) replacing IPv4's broadcast, so generally banning multicast is not pratical.
Does anybody know something about multicast in enterprise networks?Yes. But we probably won't be able to write an introductory article about multicast here, I'm afraid. Please be more specific in your question, and be sure to ask about "Layer 4 and lower" topics. That might turn out to be difficult, because with multicast, the cross-dependencies between application and transport/network layers are are even stronger and more complex than with unicast UDP/TCP. – Marc 'netztier' Luethi Jun 11 '19 at 16:00