What Is An Extranet?

Date First Published: 20th February 2022

Topic: Computer Networking

Subtopic: Network Setups

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 5/10

CONTENTS

Advantages And Disadvantages Of An Extranet
Origin

Learn more about what an extranet is in this article.

An extranet works in a similar way to an intranet as it is a private network that is used by an organisation and only available to a limited number of users, but it is an extended intranet that is accessible to locations outside of the company's LAN. Extranets provide a secure network that can be accessed by authorised users outside of the organisation, such as customers, suppliers, or other approved clients using authentication mechanisms, such as usernames and passwords.

Advantages And Disadvantages Of An Extranet

The advantages of an extranet are:

Data security - Extranets provide a safe environment for sharing data between different organisations. The data sent by an organisation could be sensitive information and extranets ensure that the information is not accessible to any unauthorised users.
Authentication - Only authorised users have the ability to access the extranet because it uses authentication, in most cases by username and password.
Network sharing - Extranets can be shared by a large number of people as several organisations could share the network connection and collaborate on the same project together.
Flexibility - Instead of an intranet, which only allows users in one organisation to connect to the network, there is flexibility in an extranet as it additionally allows people outside the organisation to connect.

The disadvantages of an extranet are:

It is more expensive to implement and maintain than an intranet - A larger sized network will result in higher costs since it requires more hardware and more users are connected to each other.
Hosting can be limited - Because an extranet is used by much more users than an intranet, it requires a high bandwidth internet connection, which may not always be possible. If a business hosts extranet pages on its own server, it will be very expensive because of the amount of bandwidth that is used.

Origin

The word 'extranet' comes from the Latin word 'extra', meaning outside, and the English word, 'net'. It can also be a combination of the two words 'external' and 'intranet'. The word started to be used by multiple businesses for describing a private network that is accessible to authorised users outside of the organisation during the late 1990s and the early 2000s.