While every business recognizes the value of the internet, relatively few have thought about having their own private intranet network that’s only accessible to the organization’s employees. Similar to the internet, intranets feature things like search engines, social networks, blogs, and other resources. For smaller companies with only one branch, intranets typically run over local area networks (LANs). Larger businesses may use a wide area network (WAN) infrastructure to serve multiple branches.
Preserving your company culture
Intranet provides a way to keep your business safe from outside threats. As an internal collaboration platform, intranet offers a great way to acquaint new employees with your company culture and establish a degree of consistency around how your team communicates. Being separate from all the noise of mainstream social media and public forums, it can serve as a repository of important information ranging from orientation guides to contract information to training videos. It’s your one-stop shop for corporate knowledge, a place for employees to learn, grow, and work more effectively as a team.
A company intranet can help foster a sense of community. In fact, many intranets have built-in social media functions where employees in different branches and departments can get to know one another. Aside from being a space for introductions and conversations, it’s also a place where strong working relationships and communities are formed. This, in turn, helps increase employee engagement and morale. Even if your business only has one branch with a couple of employees, an intranet can still serve as an invaluable digital workspace, particularly if you have a remote workforce.
Centralizing information management
One of the biggest challenges facing today’s business leaders is the constant threat to their information security. It’s especially more complicated today, as more businesses rely on mobile devices, social media, and online collaboration platforms for work.
Often, it’s virtually impossible to tell exactly where your data ends up, which poses some serious issues when it comes to information security, privacy, and compliance. That’s why business leaders need to retain full visibility into their digital assets, but that’s not going to happen without a centralized way to manage information.
Although intranets technically run on a similar infrastructure to the public internet, they’re entirely separate in nature. Not only does this lock them down from the general public, but it also gives administrators a far easier time of managing the flow of information in and out of the network. After all, it’s a lot easier to manage a relatively small local or wide-area network than the internet and the hundreds of millions of pages that come with it. Instead, an intranet provides a centralized infrastructure for storing and managing your documents and business applications that your employees can safely access no matter where they are.
Corporate intranets are far more sophisticated and easier to implement than they used to be. While traditional intranets were difficult to use and incompatible with many popular apps, new solutions integrate seamlessly with industry-leading software like SharePoint and Office 365. Furthermore, you can also choose to run modern intranets in the cloud, which means your employees will be able to access your network from any device with an internet connection.
Total Calibration provides intranet solutions that are user-friendly, modern, scalable, and cost-effective. Call us today to get your digital transformation started.
