Enabling Supply Chain Collaboration in a Hybrid Cloud

Social networking based collaboration applications or platforms are the most likely use cases to adopt cloud models as per IDC market research survey. Extending social networking concepts to enable collaboration among users in large enterprises and their partners is on the rise. Collaboration among extended partners has been one of the top challenges of large supply chain companies while security is the top most concern for cloud adoption. This paper discusses the successful enablement of collaboration among several supply chain partners using Cisco´s enterprise collaboration platform, Quad at an Infrastructure-as-a-Service public cloud provider, Savvis. Several defense-in-depth security mechanisms are implemented including federated authentication & authorization, data level security, user to site SSL-VPN, web application vulnerability assessment, multiple level firewalls, host hardening, end-to-end transport layer security in order to enhance security posture of collaboration among supply chain communities in a hybrid cloud deployment model.