Taking rural BPO to new heights: An ACM for distributed and secure document sharing

Document generation and distribution is integral to the operations of many companies focusing on rural India, such as rural Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). BPOs distribute tasks across agents in rural service delivery centres in several locations. In the absence of a foolproof security framework, the possibility of data-breach becomes large and this in turn hampers the client goodwill about the BPO and subsequent loss of business opportunities. In this context two problems need to be addressed: (i) ensuring the proper distribution of documents from clients to agents at different levels of the BPO organization and back to the client after task completion, and (ii) having a secure Access Control Model (ACM) by which the documents propagating through different users are accessed only in authorized ways based on the privacy and confidentiality interests of the client. In this paper, we focus on the second problem. Many ACMs have been proposed till date but they do not address this problem satisfactorily. We develop an access control model in the context of rural BPO. We show that our model achieves the confidentiality requirements of the clients who share their documents with the rural BPO for different tasks. Besides, our model enables the clients to specify their requirements more efficiently, hence improving usability of the overall system. This is demonstrated in the context of document translation.