Peer To Peer | StrAIT Blogging

Using the Internet for Sensitive Collaboration during Projects

August 3, 2009 | Author Michael Pattison

Revised 8-4-09

I want to post some comments on how I see the use of the Internet to collaborate on and with sensitive information. First, I am sensitive to the “cloud”, i.e., the use of web-based applications and data storage. I use it to provide our website hosting, SharePoint portal and our WordPress blog, including reference files. I have accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. I have tried an assortment of tools for blogging (and I need to delete most of those sites) before settling on WordPress. I am looked into Ning and others. I have accounts with Google Docs and Office Live Workspace. And while some of these spaces could be useful I decided to do something different for StrAIT Advisor collaboration needs.

Let’s review StrAIT Advisor’s needs. Our engagements will be fast and when completed, there can be no lasting footprint in the client’s infrastructure. Our engagements typically consist of one of us working with a small team of the client’s people. We will discuss and collaborate on the client’s business processes and value stream (for more information about value streams click here ). In both of those scenarios, we will be exchanging messages, documents and drawings that may clearly identify the client’s competitive strengths and weaknesses. The client will assume that none of that information could be accessed inappropriately. Given that I have run IT organizations and been accountable for a company’s cyber security in the past, I am extremely focused on security and best practices. To minimize our client’s risk, we will primarily use the web as the infrastructure for pipes. That means we use appropriate security tools to enable sensitive information to be transported over the web in peer to peer connections but not be stored there unless in an archive located in very secure storage where we know that we can “hug the data”. That is an old IT expression indicating that the user knows positively where their data is located physically and is comfortable with its security.

Accommodating team members with busy travel schedules is another need. Those people need to work in airports even if there is no wireless connection and work at 30,000 feet in the air and traveling at several hundred miles per hour. It will be years before the global transportation industry provides connectivity everywhere. Until then, a peer to peer approach solves this problem. Since most laptops have hard drives that vastly exceed the business needs of most people, the extra storage requirements needed typically don’t represent a major issue.

I have included a simple diagram from our overview presentation to emphasize my point. In that diagram the black arrows indicate the peer to peer connections using the “cloud” and the red arrows and database symbol indicate the archive storage. For the peer to peer collaboration we prefer to use Microsoft Groove. Groove can trace it family tree back to Lotus Notes which came out in the late 1980’s. We are satisfied that the security built in to Groove is sufficient to meet the security needs of our engagements. The archived storage can be supplied by the client’s own infrastructure or our SharePoint server. We will try to accommodate our client’s wishes if there are different architectural preferences as long as the same security needs are met and we can reuse our components and don’t have to build a customized solution. Every engagement is different.