Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-IS, also written ISIS) is a routing protocol designed to move information efficiently within a computer network, a group of physically connected computers or similar devices. It accomplishes this by determining the best route for data through a packet-switched network.
The IS-IS protocol is defined in ISO/IEC 10589:2002 as an international standard within the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) reference design. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) republished IS-IS in RFC 1142, but that RFC was later marked as “historic” by RFC 7142 because it republished a draft rather than a final version of the ISO standard, causing confusion.
IS-IS has been called “the de facto standard for large service provider network backbones.”