Intranet in the cloud
Categorised under: Intranets
Toby Ward explores the possibility of hosting the intranet in the cloud. To quote:
In short, hosting is provided as a service over the Internet. SaaS is simply hosted software that could include your website content management system, search engine, CRM (Salesforce.com), etc. The cloud is merely a metaphor based loosely on those computer network diagrams that so cleverly depict little computers with wires running between each other, servers, firewalls, etc.
I think this is a very interesting option, especially for smaller organisations. The maturity of many of the current commercial offerings is a limiting factor however, and integrating with internal systems is a little more challenging. Still, no show-stoppers…
Tags: cloud computing, Intranets, strategy
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 
2 Comments:
One benefit of an outsourced intranet in the cloud would be easy access, especially for companies whose employees are mostly mobile — no need to be in the office or connect to a VPN. The rest of us punch holes in our firewalls or put the intranet in a DMZ to do this, but it’s not always a comfortable solution.
Then again, if your intranet is in the cloud, you’re going to want some pretty good reassurances from the platform provider that your data is secure and private, and won’t end up in the wrong hands…
I agree on both these points. It’s interesting to see the approaches some organisations take on this. For example, Swiss Post created an “Intranet Light” that provides a super-simplified one-page intranet for mail delivery staff. No need to punch holes in the firewall, or move into the cloud. Not a complete solution, but it shows that hosting your own intranet does give a useful degree of flexibility…