One of the most amazing feature of internet is its ability to access data or information from anywhere in the world independent of geological locations. But in spite of it, there are several valid reasons due to which most of the big organizations do not want to grant worldwide access to their internal business information. That’s the reason why this internet –like services has been restricted inside the company which is referred as ‘Intranet’. Intranet has changed the entire internal business operations by providing networking efficiency, standard and universal computer interface for all employees in the firm.
In a broad definition ‘intranet’ is an enterprise network system which gives its users internet enabled applications to access the internal information’s inside an organization. This network links every members of an organization and gives full control of the network to that organization. But in case, if any intranet connectivity does not exist, then installed firewall prevents the outside computers to access the computers of the intranet. Intranet connectivity is the popular because of many reasons like –
- Intranet service can be placed in already existing computers of the firm.
- It allows the entire employee of an organization to access the same broadcasting organizational information.
- No training is required in order to operate intranet as it is sane as internet.
- Intranet is securer than internet.
But at times, sensitive organizational data’s are not safe because of the invasion of the hackers who try to invade the weak intranet securities and makes use of valuable organizational information. The hackers invade in intranet when there is–
- Poor configuration for permissions settings.
- Web application flaws.
- Buffer overflow.
- Out-of-band data etc.
So, this intranet flaws need to be rectified for proper Intranet Web application protection. Protection to the intranet is generally provided by fire-wall (it is group of computer systems that enforces access control policies to the intranet linked computers by permitting or blocking traffic or filtering packets between internet and intranet) which needs to be strengthened. Try to consolidate the network security on the firewall system rather than distributing it on all over the internal networks. Doing so will help you to manage the intranet security from one point from where you can use auditing and logging functions, trace the outbound and inbound connections, check the alarms for the attack occurred and so on.
So, relying on firewall before implementing intranet for proper protection would be a good move, just make sure that all the inventory traffics of an organizations are properly routed through the firewall, as firewall can not filter packets which are not routed through it.
