Difference Between Intranet and VPN

Pre-requisites: What is Intranet?, VPN

The goal of both intranet and VPN is to help you keep your private data hidden and secure, and also provide secure access to the authorized user, but they are fundamentally a bit different. VPN is based on the virtual private network and on the other hand Intranet is based on the private network within a particular organization.

Intranet

An Intranet is a private kind of internet network and you want to allow only a certain group of, people to use it, for example, members of a certain organization or employees of a certain company.

As we use the internet to search for something or to play games or to connect with someone online, The Intranet is used to communicate with others who are in the same intranet network, this is really helpful to work on projects together that require sharing of information and many confidential data resources that only the people on the intranet network can access.

Think of it like a secret club or society where only the club members can access the information and can share things with each other, so in the intranet also, only the authorized members can access the data and they can collaborate with each other to work on a project or so.

You can access the intranet through some special software or web browser, and for the safety of the information and the data of a company or organization, intranet networks are secured with the help of firewalls and some authentication system, So that only the allowed members can access the information.

VPN

We all want some things to be secret, like a secret club of friends or any message that we don’t want to disclose to anyone, virtual private network(VPN) helps you to build that secret club, and it helps us to keep our online activity secret and secure. actually when you use a VPN then you are asking your pc to connect to a server somewhere else in the world where you are not living right now, this way all of your internet surfing is routed through that selected server.

Consider this as creating a secret tunnel about which only you and your friend can see, if someone else who is outside of the tunnel tries to see inside the tunnel, all they’ll see is something that is not readable at all and makes no sense. So if you want that nobody should be able to monitor your online activity you can use VPN. 

Difference between Intranet and VPN

Characteristics	VPN	Intranet
Definition	It is a virtual private network.	It is the private network within the organization.
Access	You can access or manage the files and data remotely, which means you can access information from any location.	You can only access and share the data within the organization.
Security	While transferring the data, data encryption is done so that only authorized users can see the data.	for Intranet, access control measures are taken, and also firewalls are used for the security of the network.
Cost	Generally, you have to pay the service provider, but no other maintenance costs are required.	At first, you have to set up your network in the organization and then maintenance cost is needed.
Connectivity	VPN uses the public internet to provide services.	An intranet uses a private networking system to prove the services.
Management	It is managed by the VPN service provider.	The IT department of any organization manages the whole intranet network.
Speed	As it uses the public internet to provide services, its speed depends on internet speed.	But in the case of Intranet, the infrastructure which the organization is using matters as it also how much traffic is there.
Internet	VPN is purely dependent on the internet.	Not dependent on internet connection.
Configuration	Requires VPN client software.	Requires network configuration.