What is Intranet in the Computer Network?

An intranet is a private computer network that uses Internet Protocol technologies to securely share any part of an organization’s information or operational systems within that organization.

It is designed for the exclusive use of an organization and its associates, such as employees, customers, and other authorized people. It offers a secure platform to convey information and share data with authorized users.

It is based on internet protocols (TCP/IP) and is protected from unauthorized access with firewalls and other security systems. The firewall monitors the incoming and outgoing data packets to ensure they don't contain unauthorized requests.

So, users on the intranet can access the internet, but the internet users can't access the intranet if they are not authorized for it. Furthermore, to access the intranet, the authorised user is required to be connected to its LAN (Local Area Network).

Features

The features of Intranet are as follows −

• Controlled Access − The security capabilities of the intranet enable the company to control the availability of information and the authenticity of that information better than ever before.

• Shared access to documents − Intranet provides shared access to documents to the users.

• Centralised scheduling system − It allows meetings and events to be scheduled from a company, department and team level.

• Individualisation − Intranet ideally conforms to the individual user.

• Scalable − Intranets are fully scalable, from 10 documents to 10 million documents.

• Open − Web technology is based on open standards and is available for almost all leading operating systems and hardware platforms.