In the User Vision I noted the ability to search the domain of the user. A far easier thing to say then it is to do. Consider for a moment the number of companies within the industry. Consider the number of Joint Operating Committee's (JOC's) they participate in, and then consider the number of users that will be involved in preparing and using corporate data. Access to the user's domain when they may fulfill different roles in different JOC's for different client companies, one begins to see the issue regarding their ability to search for their information.
The idea that search and security would be linked would have seemed oxymoronic a few years ago. How could search maintain and build upon the security of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) such as the one being written about in this blog. Firstly the top priority of any development and operation of any application of this type is the quality, integrity and security of the data that is being used by producers and users. At the same time search will become an indispensable competitive tool for any oil and gas producer. Access through extensive, state of the art search technologies is a critical requirement for the oil and gas producer and user. Another critical issue is the users expectation of near single shot relevancy being provided by search giant Google. A little review of the features of the technological architecture as it is proposed here is as follows.
Authorized access will be granted to users through the world wide web. Recall that the use of a private network using IPv6 provides enhanced security that is inherent in the protocol. The producers will also access their applications from the Grid that is owned and operated as a service by Sun Microsystem. Hosting of the Genesys application by Sun provides a level of third party reliability and security that is necessary for the application. Genesys will focus on research and development of systems, not compete with Sun on infrastructure.
Each producer will have a virtualized Solaris environment on the Grid, Ingress Open Source Database Instance, and Genesys Application Server all operating side by side with other producers, possibly on the same processor. This will provide, and it stands to reason that firewall and other security requirements are already in place, each producer will access their, and only their application and data. In addition each virtualized environment will have a Google Enterprise Search Appliance maintaining the access, control list, search security, and search index's. Information about Google's Enterprise Search Appliance can be found here, and their Enterprise blog here. Information on Sun's virtualization of Solaris is here.
Deciding between money, time, and / or quality, as with any system development you are entitled to two of these objectives at the expense of the third. In the case of search security, and security in general time and quality will be at the expense of money. Although the Solaris user and Ingress user accounts are free as they are open source, they do command large fees for services of operation, the Google Search Appliance is also relatively expensive.
I found a website and consulting firm that has dedicated themselves to enterprise search and security. Idea Engineering have a newsletter that provides the necessary discussion of many of the issues companies will need to address in the future. I am highlighting a series of articles they wrote in a series of newsletters that provide value for the readers here. The series of articles are here, here and here.
A couple of the assumptions that I am operating under should be stated explicitly. We have design freedom in terms of how the application is built. Secondly, we have the cost of 1 Million Instruction Per Second (MIPS) of processing power is now $0.01 (processor costs only), enabling intense, yet affordable processing capability. Think encryption, virtualization of each producer each employee, heavy and multiple indexing algorithms and access control lists, processing demand will be very high. Add the unique perspectives that are part of this blog like Military Command Structures, Single Sign On (SSO) which is a necessary feature.
Lastly the manner that I see this application being built is through the ultimate users. What I would like to see happen is that a discussion around these points fill in some of the detail and ferret out the finer points and issues. It is the users application and their involvement is being called on for this critical issue.
Technorati Tags: Genesys, User, Vision, Data, Search, Security
