by Dave Murphy
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is expected to
announce later today that it has selected five universities to develop a
secure, decentralized infrastructure for the Internet. The Infrastructure for
Resilient Internet Systems (IRIS) project will create a distributed hash table
(DHT) that facilitates distributed data systems.
DHT technology creates multiple pointers to data, concurrently
storing data files on several servers. If one server is inaccessible, not all
of the data is lost. Similar to peer-to-peer networks in which there is no
central server, a DHT system does not have a central control point for all
data.
The IRIS project will develop a lookup algorithm that
enables dislocated data to be quickly acquired and assembled. The project, once
implemented, will afford greater security of online data in the event of a
targeted or general outage due to viruses, worms or cyberattack.
The NSF has initially awarded $12 million over five years to
the following computer science departments:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
the University
of California at Berkeley,
the International Computer Science
Institute,
New York University,
and
Rice University.
Dave's Opinion
Last evening, during an e-business graduate seminar at the University
of Phoenix, I posed two questions
to the students that generated a significant discussion:
What technologies do they not use and
What must change before e-commerce becomes the norm, rather
than onground commerce.
One of the primary technologies that they agreed must
develop further before they judged e-commerce would become the preferred medium
was security, especially the protection of private, individual information and
commercial transaction data. I think is coincidental that today the National
Science Foundation will announce a project to develop a secure storage medium
for Internet-based data.
I left the seminar's students with a final question to
consider until the next class meeting: what must change such that you could
create a totally e-business for your organization. In effect, what must occur
before you could be totally paperless, geographically independent, and
asynchronous in all of your operations and services? How about it? What changes
must be implemented for your organization to be totally e?
References:
National Science Foundation: http://nsf.gov/
Dave Murphy is founder and membership director of ITrain, the International Association of Information
Technology Trainers. ITrain is the global
professional society for IT trainers.