SUPPORTING

STAKEHOLDERS
WITH
EXTRANETS

HOW-TO GUIDE
 Supporting Stakeholders with Extranets
HOW-TO GUIDE

This report provides practical advice for developing secure, user-friendly extranets for your key
stakeholders.

Read this brief report to learn:

What is an Extranet?
Business Benefits of Creating an Extranet
Security Issues Surrounding Extranets
Extranet Design Best Practices
How to Set-up your Extranet

Review this report to understand how to implement an external communication tool for employees,
partners, customers, or other key stakeholders. Use our Extranet Development Checklist to
ensure you don’t miss any key steps in the process.

What is an Extranet?

An extranet is an extension of a company’s internal network that allows authorized users to access
information in a secured manner. Public access can be given to employees, customers, partners,
investors, or other key stakeholders.

Extranets generally reside on a company’s private server rather than on a public Internet server.
However, they use Internet protocols so users can navigate with a web browser.

Access from the Internet can be controlled through various architectures that are username/pass-
word specific, thus limiting users to pages relevant to their needs, while keeping other areas of
the extranet private and secure.

2 SUPPORTING STAKEHOLDERS WITH EXTRANETS HOW-TO GUIDE

Business Benefits of Creating an Extranet

Many service oriented companies use extranets to provide a system for customer support and to
have a single user interface to communicate with business partners. Other reasons companies
tend to use extranets are as follows:

Supply Chain Integration: online ordering, order tracking, and inventory management.

Cost Reduction: companies will often make manuals, catalogues, or technical documentation
available online to save money on printing and distributing hard copies.

Accountability: past projects and draft documents can be archived, accurate time and billing
information can be documented, and a communication log can be maintained to ensure
service level agreement are met.

Collaboration between Business Partners: allowing members of a product team to work with
common documentation remotely can increase collaboration.

Improve Business Relationships: extranets provide better communications among business

partners.

Improve Customer Service: allows customers to have direct access to information and to
resolve their own inquiries 24/7.

Work remotely: enables constant communication and access to business information regard-
less of time or location. This can also make servicing remote clients easier and less expensive
than traditional methods.

Security: provided this is a requirement for your extranet, exchanges will take place in a secure
environment with log information readily available.

Security Issues Surrounding Extranets

When business data is made available to stakeholders, it is expected to be available, up-to-date

and secure at all times. It is often difficult to protect all extranet applications using the same
security infrastructure because each business application tends to have its own unique set of
performance and security requirements.

The following is a list of key security considerations:

Align Stakeholder Security Expectations: ensure that all users of the extranet understand that
they have a responsibility to ensure that data is kept secure.

3 SUPPORTING STAKEHOLDERS WITH EXTRANETS HOW-TO GUIDE

 Document Service Level Agreements (SLA): clearly document resolution times for customer
issues, based on severity, business impact, and available resources. Minimize any liabilities
regarding customer support.

Take Extranet Liabilities into Account: risks such as unplanned disasters (denial of service),
performance degradations or application unavailability, and security breaches, can cause
major problems if your business becomes entirely dependent on this system.

Review Extranet Access Controls: validate that they represent the best choices for the specific
business applications and user connectivity needs. Consider adding two-factor authentication
to increase security.

Cost Development Efforts Accordingly: All administration, integration, and management

costs should not be overlooked or underestimated.

Consider Other Security Measures on a per application basis: These include data encryption
and protection, mutual client/server authentication, and user access rights verification along
with non-repudiation.

Establish Security Policies: user access and privilege requirements must be established,
disseminated to users, and actively enforced to reduce your risk.

Review Privacy Legislation: evaluate HIPAA, Sarbanes Oxley, and other legislation to ensure
that the information you plan to provide is permitted.

Application Security Reviews: should be conducted to ensure that security policies are
working as planned. Be sure to actively check access logs on a weekly basis.

Servers and Physical Storage: must be situated in a secure environment to ensure application
availability.

Don’t Forget to Create Backups: on a daily basis.

4 SUPPORTING STAKEHOLDERS WITH EXTRANETS HOW-TO GUIDE

Extranet Design Best Practices

Take Time to Select the Right Solution: employees must be comfortable with the solution. It
must also reflect the right amount of information you want to store and exchange with clients,
partners, or other users.

Consider Outside Assistance: If you don’t have internal IT skills, hire a reputable IT service
provider who can help with set-up, hosting and on-going support.

Monitor the Solution: monitoring can be done both internally (through employee survey) and
externally (through client feedback). Also, review adoption rates and application performance
on a regular basis.

Review the Solution: after a few months, conduct a formal review to see how much money
the system has saved your organization. It is also important to consider intangible benefits like
increased customer satisfaction.

If It’s Not Working, Don’t Use It: don’t waste time trying to force a fit for all stakeholders.
You can always add functionality or sections for stakeholder groups on an incremental basis.
Current solutions may need to be replaced with more user-friendly or secure applications.

Don’t Put Everything In: too much information in your extranet can make it more difficult
for users to find what they are looking for. Create a homepage that lists the most commonly
searched for information, to facilitate user adoption rates and experience.

5 SUPPORTING STAKEHOLDERS WITH EXTRANETS HOW-TO GUIDE

 Action Plan
STEP 1 - Requirements

1 Requirements
Define your Requirements

2 Goals Make sure to use Demand

Metric’s Extranet Development
Checklist to ensure nothing is
Target
3 Audience
overlooked when setting up
your extranet. It is important to
take the following criteria into
consideration before moving
4 Content
forward.
Conduct ample research
Control into external and internal
5 Access stakeholder requirements.
Use our Market
Requirements Document to
6 Based on Roles document requirements for
each stakeholder group.

7 Implementation

8 Launch

Extranet Development Checklist

9 Training
VIEW RESOURCE

10 Review

6 SUPPORTING STAKEHOLDERS WITH EXTRANETS HOW-TO GUIDE

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