Via Judith Meskill comes news of a white paper about online gated communities
The news release says
“Communicator Inc, a provider of secure communications solutions, is making available a white paper about secure communications within and across multiple companies, resulting from research collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The paper, written by Daniel Greenwood, Esq., director of MIT’s eCommerce Architecture Program, introduces the concept of the online gated community, compares it to other approaches to architecting secure extended enterprises, and describes how companies such as Communicator provide the framework and operational functions necessary to extend the enterprise while protecting its borders
“The paper focuses on the problem of extending an enterprise by opening up systems and operations, while at the same time maintaining or tightening security and risk management to protect an organization’s assets. Greenwood identifies the online gated community as the best way to address the dilemma of proliferating heterogeneous networked systems and user identity schemes. He also describes how existing information technologies and new types of network service providers enable gated communities and cross-boundary business integration as a solution. According to Greenwood, such business opportunities provide avenues for direct cost reductions, greater productivity and new revenue sources.”Whilst the concept of gated communities evokes images of the worst kind of segregated housing arrangements in the United States, we should not dismiss this approach as a possible means of encouraging security-conscious companies to create inter-organisational online communites, which they are notoriously reluctant to do in many industries
It will be interesting to see how they deal with the persistent identity management issues that arise from this work, and the potential human-level security holes this can open up, on a purely practical level.