Intranets are used by many companies as a way of conveying information and sharing data with other members of their network.

An intranet is a secure way of sharing information between employees. In order to access your company’s intranet, you’ll need to be connected to its LAN (Local area network), this can be achieved by either using a remote access VPN or by being at one of your companies remote sites but being pat of a site-to-site VPN (as detailed in our blog “Should my business use a VPN?“)

A company intranet is essentially an internal website for members of an organisation. This is useful to not only communicate messages between all staff which can be seen at the same time in a central place via a web browser, it can host important information such as, useful links, forms and applications. Databases can also be linked to the setup of the intranet in order to provide further access to company records and even improve security by holding usernames of people that are allowed access.

What equipment do I need to host an intranet?

A web server is used to host the intranet and the machine itself will depend on the content and the number of users. For example, if the intranet is going to have content such as videos that will be streamed by a lot of employees then the server will need to be of a higher specification. However, if the web server is going to be purely a very basic front page which has company information on a basic homepage and links with URL’s that are required for day-to-day work, then you will not need a very high specification server for this (this does of course still depend on the number of users within the organisation).

Intranet is in the long term a cheaper way of conveying this sort of information as although the equipment is needed initially, you will then be able to centralise your companies access to the online resources they need with no subscription fees.