Secure Collaboration in A&D

What are your business process requirements for managing access control and content classification?

April 27th, 2009 | Secure Collaboration in A&D | Posted by Richard Prince

One of the most daunting tasks in secure collaboration is the process of organizing your business IP so that advanced technology can be employed to control and record access.

Collecting disparate and fragmented information across the enterprise is a gargantuan task.  Many organizations have difficulty implementing secure collaboration solutions because they cannot get beyond the task of identifying data sources and grouping the underlying content.

For example, organizations may have myriad instances of File Servers which are used as information archives.  You may also have a variety of repositories or “silos” for data such as engineering or manufacturing documents, Bills of Materials, change management artifacts/records, manufacturing work instructions, etc.

A core capability of leading secure collaboration technology solutions is content classification where business IP can be tagged or annotated according to security characteristics.  Other core capabilities include access control mechanisms, audit logging and access reporting as well as physical considerations such as HTTPS, Single Sign On (SSO), and Firewalls.

The discussion this week is intended to focus on the business or organizational implications of implementing and deploying technology solutions.  Some typical questions include:

• What types of business process implications do you anticipate as it relates to organizing enterprise content for classification?
• What types of business repositories need to be assessed and considered?
• Can you define some typical access control requirements which you feel might be required for your organization?
• Do you understand the different forms of access control?
• Does your organization currently use technology to electronically control and secure IP?  How effective are these applications?
• Are there instances where your organization is using a particular technology for collaboration even though that application was never intended to be used for collaborating across diverse and distributed groups?  What business problems or inefficiencies were introduced because of the misapplication of technology?
• What other business process implications do you see as you approach this task?

Please share your experiences and best practices regarding organizing and classifying IP.

Permalink | April 27th, 2009

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