Levels of encryption along with eliminating the servers as a single point of failure will be important factors in the success of the P2P project at American Century. The hybrid architecture is also important in that the majority of P2P applications lack management tools. The lack of these tools along with other scalability and security concerns results in P2P applications being described as difficult to effectively integrate into an enterprise infrastructure. The hybrid model has the ability to provide some of the management functionality. CO is similar to Napster but is designed to handle large size files such as CAD and other engineering applications.
Users get to view details only as required.
This method also improves the security of the application compared to other P2P technologies. The entire original model remains on the person's machine that created it. Even if an encoded message were compromised, the user would see only a small portion and not the entire model. P2P technologies are definitely here and the applications will be coming fast and furious. Businesses will need to do a thorough risk assessment of their enterprise prior to deploying P2P technologies.