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Gartner Predicts $10 Billion Market for ‘Communities of Trust’ to Safeguard Corporate Networks
Communities of Trust Needed to Combat Security Risks Caused by Increasingly Collaborative Business Community
An increasingly collaborative business community is putting organisations and individuals at risk from new security breeches, according to Gartner. Although companies stand to gain huge competitive advantage by sharing sensitive information outside of traditional corporate boundaries, large scale collaboration requires a highly trustable digital environment. Gartner predicts that new technologies which transcend existing enterprise infrastructures, maintaining control over information while significantly improving external collaboration, represent a rapidly growing market opportunity. The company estimates that the market for the ‘Communities of Trust’ that provide such an infrastructure could be worth at least $10 billion by 2012.
Gartner defines a Community of Trust as a socio-technical construct that meets the communications and security needs for the ongoing sharing of sensitive data across the Internet between multiple organisations. Built on top of the existing enterprise and the Internet, a Community of Trust provides the social conventions and technical standards necessary to support expansive collaboration, ensuring that initial conditions for trusted collaboration are met, and that they remain within limits.
"Increasingly, we are seeing previously closed corporate networks being opened up to external parties such as suppliers, customers and even competitors," said Jay Heiser, research vice president at Gartner. "Although such an open collaborative approach brings substantial business benefits, it does demand a radical rethink of existing trust mechanisms."
Typical examples of the growing number of collaboration-heavy situations that render platform-based security technology obsolete include:
- IT and business process outsourcing
- Use of external "consultants," including auditors, lawyers and accountants
- Outsourcing manufacturing
- Supply chains
- Joint ventures with competitors
- Communications with boards of directors
"Traditional security mechanisms provided by the operating system or network are just not suitable for meeting this kind of need," said Mr Heiser. "However, effective solutions can be found in security technology that overlays the existing infrastructure, instead of being dependent on it."
Gartner estimates that today’s somewhat primitive Community of Trust market already represents more than $1 billion and that this is split approximately in half between a specific set of security technologies, and a very wide range of hosted services that are intended for trusted multi-enterprise use. Early examples of software as a service (SaaS) based trusted communities include Salesforce.com’s Partner Relationship Management offering, litigation support systems that are simultaneously shared between plaintiff and defendant, board communication systems, and whistle-blowing systems that allow ongoing trusted communications between an anonymous outsider and a corporate investigator. The market is set to grow rapidly over the next five years said Mr Heiser. "As a conservative estimate, at least $7 billion of SaaS sales and $3 billion of security technology sales will be associated with the use or implementation of trustable business-to-business collaboration and communication applications by 2012."
Mr. Heiser advised end-user organisations to develop a better appreciation for the scalable trust technology that may already be in place, but not strategically utilised. "Some organisations may well find that they have the makings of a perfectly suitable Community of Trust infrastructure, without being aware of how easy it would be to improve external collaboration," he said. At the same time Mr Heiser warned that vendors need to explicitly address Communities of Trust requirements, developing powerful and safe software and services that can be used to support multi-enterprise integration. He said that technology providers and users alike must develop a more-sophisticated understanding of the evolving needs of ever-changing Internet-based collaborative communities, developing new models, architectures and processes to support these new business requirements. He concluded with advice for corporate risk managers and legal counsel who should anticipate that increased levels of external information sharing, even when protected by new trust technologies, will encourage litigation and government investigation. 08.03.2007, Gartner, Inc.
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