{"id":12058,"date":"2009-07-08T15:44:57","date_gmt":"2009-07-08T14:44:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/?p=1095"},"modified":"2009-07-08T15:44:57","modified_gmt":"2009-07-08T14:44:57","slug":"a-big-cryptographic-boost-for-on-demand-bi-and-extranets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/a-big-cryptographic-boost-for-on-demand-bi-and-extranets.html","title":{"rendered":"A Big Cryptographic Boost for On-Demand BI and Extranets?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"coding-banner\"<\/p>\n

\"\"A recent cryptographic breakthrough made by Craig Gentry<\/a> that potentially has huge consequences for business intelligence.<\/p>\n

One of the big problems plaguing the use of on-demand business intelligence has been concerns over data security.<\/p>\n

As Forbes<\/a> and others have reported, the new techniques could reassure companies who want to take benefit of cloud computing for analysis (at a cost of massive computing power).<\/p>\n

As IBM Research VP Charles Lickel<\/a> notes in a blog post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Using the solution could help strengthen the business model of “cloud computing,” where a computer vendor is entrusted to host the confidential data of others in a ubiquitous Internet presence. It might better enable a cloud computing vendor to perform computations on clients’ data at their request, such as analyzing sales patterns, without exposing the original data.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The new techniques might also help in another area: extranet business intelligence. In today\u2019s connected ecosystems of customer and partners, it\u2019s essential to be able to share information for the good of all. But although extranets have been around since the earliest web-based BI tools, they are still not as widely used as one might expect.<\/p>\n

There are several reasons for this \u2013 not least the ubiquitous data quality problems that companies are reluctant to expose outside the company\u2019s firewall. But one big reason is that companies don\u2019t necessarily trust their partners to look after the information.<\/p>\n

Today, there aren\u2019t great mechanisms in place for both sharing and<\/em> protecting information. It\u2019s easy to share information information outside the firewall using today\u2019s web-based BI systems, or an on-demand platform like that of BusinessObjects<\/a>. But how can you stop people from taking the information and using it elsewhere?<\/p>\n

In many ways, this is analogous to letting people buy a CD, but not letting them make a digital copy of it. Although the music industry has tried to introduce and enforce digital rights management, it has proven woefully inadequate.<\/p>\n

The health industry is a great example of the \u201cdata governance\u201d issues that this problem creates. Individual health records are sacrosanct \u2013 nobody wants to have their colonoscopy results freely available on the web. But at the same time, being able to analyze the detailed data of large numbers of patient treatments and outcomes is essential if we\u2019re going to improve medicine as a whole. So we have to be able to protect data and share it in aggregate, and various methods have been proposed to try to achieve this in bodies such as the UK\u2019s national health service (which handily has a lot of data under its control, unlike the US health system).<\/p>\n

Other example is industry data. Each participant in an industry benefits by having aggregate information about the industry as a whole, and a lot of middlemen and agencies have sprung up to collect information from companies (retailers, broadcasters, software companies, etc.) and then sell it back to them at a markup. In theory, these middlemen could be made obsolete, with people volunteering data to a central body, with strict controls on what data was made available to each participant. But too often, there isn\u2019t enough trust, and no mechanism for associating payments with data value (this is what killed the \u201cnet market\u201d phenomenon of the 90s).<\/p>\n

Could encryption be part of the answer? I\u2019m no expert, but so far, it seems like this particular breakthrough only applies directly to large-scale data mining issues, where you can do the analysis in \u201cblack box\u201d fashion. The next step would be to allow companies to upload encrypted data sets that could still be linked at the raw data level (using some sort of public-key encryption?) \u2013 since this is what would be required for meaningful data analysis.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m convinced that we\u2019re going to spend the next couple of decades on these problems \u2013 building the equivalent of the world\u2019s monetary system (and look at the problems that has generated recently!) for data. Anything that can help, such as this encryption breakthrough is a step along the way\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent cryptographic breakthrough made by IBM Researcher Craig Gentry that potentially has huge consequences for both on-demand and extranet business intelligence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[206,212,303,537,911],"class_list":["post-12058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-business-objects","tag-businessintelligence","tag-cryptography","tag-governance","tag-sap"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-38u","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12058\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}