A DMZ is a “demilitarized zone.” In networking, this term means an area of the network that is accessible to the public. The DMZ isn’t undefended. It has a firewall and traffic management devices, such as load balancing and DDoS protection, to protect it. However, there will be a second firewall between the publicly accessible DMZ and the network used for office functions. Port forwarding involves network address translation (NAT) it maps private network IP addresses to unique public IP addresses for use on the internet. As you can see, DMZ is a network topology and port forwarding is an address management strategy.