A Data-centered Usage Governance: Providing Life-long Protection to Data Exchanged in Virtual Enterprises

Abstract

: Since the early definition of the Virtual Enterprise concept in the 90s, efficient information sharing and trust have been pointed out as major challenges to support the enactment of collaborative organisations. By now, traditional Collaborative Business support systems have been designed to interconnect corporate Business Processes and different well-known information systems, whereas trust is mostly managed thanks to inter-personal relationships. Unfortunately, this well-perimetrized vision of a Collaborative Network Organization does not fit the large scale, opened and evolving context due to the fast adoption of Industry 4.0 and sharing economy models which rely on the large scale adoption of Social Mobile Analytics Cloud Internet of Things technologies (later called SMACIT for short) and semi-opened information systems. This involves rethinking the way information, services and applications are organized, deployed, shared and protected, moving from the traditional perimetrized system protection to data and service life-long usage control. To this end, we propose a data-driven security organization which uses a multi-layer architecture to describe on one hand the logical organisation of the information system, i.e. the data assets and the business services needed to implement the collaborative business processes and on the other hand the multiple copies exchanged with different service providers. Based on this Information System meta-model, our system integrates a blockchain-based usage manager to govern the way information are exchanged and processed.