What is an Intranet
and how can it benefit
your organization?

An intranet's main purpose is to facilitate efficient, transparent, participative, and inclusive internal company communication. An intranet makes it easier for employees to collaborate, find and share information, resources, internal competence and knowledge. Ultimately, if designed and maintained, an intranet can boost efficiency, flexibility, organizational cohesion and productivity.

You’re probably well familiar with websites. It’s a collection of web pages and other related content which are held together by a common domain name and published on a web server. An Internet website is always public in the sense that anyone can surf to it via the Internet.

An intranet site is a website being hosted on a private network, only accessible to authenticated users, for instance the employees in a company or an organization. On the site users can search for internal information and colleagues, partake in discussions, collaborate on projects, share their thoughts and knowledge with the entire organization, access various work tools and much more.

An intranet is the most efficient platform for organization-wide communication and sharing of information, tools, competence, and knowledge. In most organizations, it also serves as a digital hub for internal collaboration, allowing easy access to collaboration spaces, tools, teams, files, project templates, etc. Gathering all information, documents, media files, tools, and other resources in a single space also makes an intranet considerably easier for users to access and find what they need to execute their work tasks. When used effectively, an intranet can become a company’s “single version of the truth.” This reinforces the information’s reliability and trustworthiness, eliminating unnecessary misinterpretations, and bad decisions based on inaccurate information.

Without an intranet, internal communication is often a mixture of e-mails, chat messages in siloed collaboration spaces, SMS, and verbal announcements in ad hoc and regular group meetings. It’s difficult to keep the information uniform and accessible to everyone simultaneously. With an intranet, however, you can eliminate all inefficient channels and discrepancies in how the information is conveyed. An intranet is a digital hub for company information, documents, media files, and other resources, thus boosting productivity.

The internet is a global public communications network, accessible to anyone. The Internet is not owned or controlled by anyone. Instead, governments, corporations, and organizations such as the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), the Internet Society (ISOC), and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) collaborate on Internet governance policies. This includes, for instance, IP address space allocation, protocol parameter assignment, domain name system (DNS) management, etc. All of which is necessary for the Internet’s stable and secure operations.

An intranet is a private network, only allowing access to employees and others affiliated with the organization. An intranet can also be bought and implemented as a Software as a Service (SaaS).

An extranet is similar to an intranet in the sense that it is a controlled private network, and normally it’s a subset of the content and functionality of an organization's intranet. While the intranet embraces the employees of an organization, the extranet extends outwards, allowing access to authorized partners, suppliers, customers, and other external users.

The prefix “intra” in “intranet” is Latin for “inside” or “within”. Since the Internet and an intranet works more or less the same, you could say that an intranet is a miniature version of the Internet within a private network. A network confined within an organization, a company, a community, a municipality, a school etc. An intranet and the Internet use the communications standard TCP/IP to connect hosts to users on a network. They also use web pages to distribute and present texts, images, videos, forms, and files to download, as well as scripts to run and interact with (like chat rooms). A website on the Internet is hosted on a web server allowing for public access, meaning that anyone can access it.

An intranet can either be an on-premises solution, installed on a local web server at the company/organization, or a cloud-based solution. However, both solutions have restricted user access, for instance, only allowing a company’s employees to enter. A cloud-based intranet is a little easier to access when away from the office, as it can be accessed as any other website on the internet (although you have to log in to the site using various security/authentication solutions). Many organizations and companies also make their on-premises intranets available for users via the Internet using so-called VPN, Virtual Private Networks.

Intranets which don’t allow for employee interaction, user-to-user communication or feedback are not social. Their main purpose is to distribute information and news in a top-down fashion and to make internal information and resources more accessible. A social intranet encourages employees to get involved in discussions, improvement projects, knowledge-sharing and ideation processes, etc., and to expand and strengthen their relationships within the organization. Read the blog post A social intranet boosts employee engagement to learn more about the features and benefits of a social intranet.

Practically any system can be hacked. Intranets are no exception. Some organizations choose to host the intranet on-premises just for that reason. But even if an intranet is hosted locally, with no user access via the Internet, it is susceptible to hacker attacks and malicious software. A nasty code can be introduced into the network via, for instance, a thumb drive. And since the users are using email and surfing the internet there are plenty of opportunities for hackers to bait them into clicking on malicious links or downloading infected files.

But there’s no reason to panic. With proper firewall and malware protection, a robust password and authentication (preferably multifactor authentication) policy, strict rules about what the users are allowed to do on their computers and the network, and keeping the entire software portfolio constantly updated you can keep most of the hackers at bay. A strong defense system is built in layers and the more valuable assets you want to protect, the more security layers you need around them.