Intranet Vs Internet: What's The Difference?

If you're here, you're familiar with the internet. You've probably also heard of an intranet, and you might even belong to one. What, exactly, is the difference? The quick answer is that the internet is the whole thing, the global network of computers sharing information worldwide. An intranet is also a computer network for sharing data, but it's blocked off with security measures that grant access only to certain approved users.

Most intranets are administered by employers for the use of employees, hosting data the employer would rather not share with the digital-enabled world. An intranet can serve any number of purposes but is most often implemented as a tool for coworkers to collaborate and share information without worrying about security or being bothered by unwelcome distractions. That's just the basics, though, and the differences between the internet and intranet go beyond their basic structure into who uses them, what value they deliver, and how they work.

Internet users have long been worried about data security. Everybody's onboard for free and equal access to digital information until that information is their bank details, company secrets, or intimate chats with their partner. Creating any ethical data network requires balancing two important, contradictory concerns: access and privacy. The simplest answer to that complicated question is to set up a limited network where approved people can access approved sets of data and strong security excludes unwelcome visitors. That's an intranet.

In many ways, intranets are older than the internet. There were limited digital filesharing systems long before Berners-Lee and other programmers made the modern internet available to everyone. Per the Computer History Museum, ARPANET, the filesharing network used by the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Association, transmitted its first packets in 1970 through the Network Control Protocol, long before the CERN proposal in 1989. The 1970s and 1980s saw similar security-minded interests create limited data-transfer networks worldwide. 

All would fall under the modern definition of "intranet," as they shared information digitally and strictly limited who had access. You might be on an intranet right now. If so, you probably had to enter a password or scan something at an access point before you could get online. That's the intranet doing its job.

"What is the purpose of the internet?" is a question beyond the scope of this article. The internet has lots of purposes. That said, those purposes do generally fall under the heading of data transfer. When an internet-enabled person wants to know about something, their starting point might be Google or Wikipedia or right here at SlashGear, but it will consistently be an internet-based resource available to the public at large. The same is true of other classic internet applications like social media and gaming — it all comes back to making data available to lots of computers at once.

Intranets, by contrast, often have an entirely different purpose. It would be easy to view an intranet as just a smaller, more limited internet, a mechanism for data transfer with restrictions on what data goes to which users. That's accurate but reductive. The main purpose of most intranets is collaboration (via Axero). Rather than simply storing information securely, an intranet also organizes its information for the convenience of its users, who are most often members of a team working toward a goal. A university may, for example, have an intranet only available to its employees.