The furor of publicity surrounding Napster's peer-to-peer (P2P) technology in the consumer market has fuelled a hunger for P2P in the enterprise. What can P2P do for the business world?
In any organisation, it's extremely challenging to leverage company knowledge and get information to flow effectively. With trends toward corporate consolidation, that challenge is multiplied. P2P Content Networks help relieve that pain.
For example, suppose you're in business development and analysing a potential partnership. As part of your background search, you check for resources in your office, other offices, existing partners, and the Internet. You start a flurry of emails and phone calls, and you visit one Web site after another. The process is laborious. P2P Content Networking solves this problem in the enterprise. It fundamentally changes the way businesses use information.
The architecture of P2P Content Networking mirrors the architecture of most businesses, namely one that is decentralised and distributed. Because of this, businesses are using it to cut costs, make employees more effective and improve customer service. For these businesses, P2P Content Networking is all about capitalising on the advantages of decentralisation. It lets users easily work with information that sits across the enterprise without having to send it all into one central IT facility.
However, corporations demand the advantages provided by P2P networks without the security and reliability concerns that are sometimes associated with the technology. So the remaining question is: "How can P2P networks be deployed in the enterprise ans still satisfy the concerns of IT managers so that intellectual assets will not be compromised?"
The recent P2P buzz has been about free content, rights issues, low control, and even anarchy. All of these terms seem to contradict what enterprises want. Enterprises want return on investment, legal protection, backup, security and predictability. This is especially true for the IT department.
Many P2P technologies today support peering only between the machines of individual users, circumventing the server room and raising security concerns. Corporations are much more interested in P2P technology that enables closely managed machines to interact as peers in a network.
The hallmark of P2P is virtual centralisation: making resources look like they are all in one place even though they are physically very distributed. Server-based peer-to-peer provides all of these values without the downsides often associated with P2P.
Valuable information resides on the hard drives of individual users' desktop and laptop machines. A P2P Content Network is easily deployed onto such machines, and with appropriate software security. Yet, enterprise customers are still hesitant about purely desktop-based solutions. Why? Firstly, reliability.
Regular backups are difficult when individual machines can be truned off at any time. What happens if a worker solving a problem in Melbourne needs information from the US or China, but it's on a laptop in someone's briefcase? Servers are constantly connected and more reliable, regardless of time zone.
The second is security. Many P2P products have strong strong software security, but physical security is the weak link - if you leave your laptop on a plane with top-secret plans on it, it may be as good as published. Server rooms are physically secured with security systems. That's why they are deploying P2P Content Netwroks at the level of local data centres, such as offices and server rooms.
As P2P technologies begin to be used more in the enterprise, deployment onto desktops and even mobile devices will undoubtedly become more commonplace in enterprises. In the future, customers will be able to connect PDAs and other mobile devices to their Content Networks.
Until then, large enterprises are demanding P2P solutions that provide returns on investment without forcing them to adopt practices they have traditionally regarded as risky and that can satisfy the hunger of businesses for P2P technology.
