Security is one of the most fundamental things in enterprise systems. If you think about every enterprise system as a big data store with applied business rules, security will be the one you will need to evaluate first in order to map it to your organization. It comes in multiple dimensions about who is getting access to information and in which way. Additional business complexity can increase the complexity of security model even more.
Cloud systems development is trending these days. We can see additional cloud applications and systems almost every day. It comes to the situation when collaborative usage of multiple cloud systems and applications becomes real. I’ve been reading Engineering.com article Can CAD-in-the-Cloud Handle the Entire Product Lifecycle? Read the article and draw your opinion. The important intent I captured is related to combining different disciplines and cloud tools under a single hood of entire product lifecycle development and business practice.
The decomposition of the process into stages and using of different cloud application can bring an interesting perspective on required security model. Actually, I can see security becomes a hot issue in the cloud development. The time when security was only about “file-share” options is gone. Today, cloud systems and users are demanding much more granular data organization and security management.
My attention was caught by an interesting acquisition made by Box. Navigate to the following article to read – Box Acquires dLoop To Enhance Security With Fine-Grained Data Analytics Technology. Box is well known outfit producing variety of tools and specifically focusing on enterprise customers. My hunch, the deal is the answer to an increased demand for data security in enterprise and it comes as part of growing competition with tools such as Dropbox and other consumer file sharing tools. Despite huge success in consumer space, security and enterprise deployment is probably still a challenging point for most of them. Here is an interesting passage from TechCrunch article:
We’ve been spending a lot of time improving the end user experience on Box, but we’re equally committed to creating better management tools for enterprise IT. This means unlocking greater visibility into the activities happening around information, and providing more granular controls where necessary. dLoop’s machine learning capabilities will ultimately allow Box to help enterprise customers identify and surface relevant content by tracking activity patterns… In larger enterprises, data classification is becoming a must-have in order to control what people can do with files. Companies want policy-based file sharing. Box has made considerable effort to enhance its security.
Policy based security is a key thing here. Thinking about full product lifecycle scenario involving multiple tools and people, policy based security can be the only way to support a granular security model. The needs for security is only one aspect. Ultimately, the goal of enterprise systems today is to improve user experience. In my opinion, without an appropriate data granularity, this is mission impossible for most of systems today. Cloud is adding an additional dimension of complexity. It comes as part of scenarios related to multiple cloud tools and shared content.
What is my conclusion? New environments, old problems and even bigger challenges. This is how I can see a combination of enterprise reality, new cloud systems and demand for security. The granularity is a key, in my view. Without policy based granular access, cloud product development tools such as CAD, CAE, CAM, PLM and others will remain childish and fail meet real enterprise customers scenarios. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
