6.9. Intranet and Extranet

Intranet (Intranet) is a local or geographically distributed private network of the organization, which is characterized by embedded security mechanisms. This network is based on Internet technologies. The term “Intranet” appeared and became widely used in 1995. It means that the company uses the Internet technology inside (intra-) its local network. The advantage of using an intranet is to provide all employees of the company with access to any information necessary for work, regardless of the location of the employee’s computer and the available hardware and software. The main reason for the use of Intranet in commercial organizations is the need to accelerate the process of collecting, processing, managing and providing information.

Often, companies that engage in e-business on the Internet form a mixed network in which a subset of the corporation’s internal sites forms an Intranet, and the external communication centers with the Internet are called Extranets.

Extranet also refers to the type of corporate network.

Extranet (English extranet ) is a corporate network protected from unauthorized access, using Internet technologies for internal corporate purposes, as well as to provide part of corporate information and corporate applications to business partners of the company.

Security issues on the Extranet are much more serious than on the Intranet. For the Extranet network, user authentication (which may not be an employee of the company) and, especially, protection against unauthorized access are particularly important, whereas for Intranet applications they play a much less significant role, since access to this network is limited to the company's physical scope.

Corporate use Extranet is closed corporate portals that host closed corporate materials and provide access to authorized employees of the company to applications for teamwork, automated company management systems, as well as access to a limited number of materials to partners and regular customers of the company. In addition, other Internet services are also possible on the Extranet: e-mail, FTP, etc.

The basis of applications on the Intranet is the use of Internet and, in particular, Web technologies:

1) hypertext in HTML;

2) HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol;

3) CGI server application interface.

In addition, the Intranet includes Web servers for static or dynamic publishing of information and Web browsers used to view and interpret hypertext. The basis of all Intranet solutions for interacting with the database is the client-server architecture.

For various organizations, the use of intranets has several important advantages:

1) on the intranet, each user from a configured workstation can access any of the most recent versions of documents as soon as they are placed on the Web server. The location of the user and the Web server is irrelevant. This approach in large organizations makes it possible to significantly save money;

2) documents on the Intranet can update automatically (in real time). In addition, when a document is published on a Web server, at any time it is possible to obtain information about which of the company's employees, when and how many times did it access the published documents;

3) a variety of organizations use applications that allow access to company databases directly from a Web browser;

4) access to published information can be made via the Internet in the case of a password to access the company's internal databases. An external user who does not have a password cannot access the internal confidential information of the company.