Virtual enterprise security: importance, challenges, and solutions

Advances in Information and communication technology causes many changes in societies and human being life. One of these changes is formation of virtual enterprises concept in electronic markets. A virtual enterprise is a temporary alliance of autonomous and possibly geographically distributed organizations that pool their resources to meet short-term goals and exploit fast changing market trends. The important topic in a virtual enterprise life cycle is maintaining its security. Because if a virtual enterprise do not maintain its security, its lifeblood data and information will be accessed and used by other competitors and this means that virtual enterprise will defeat in electronic market. In this paper, we describe some security problems in virtual enterprise architecture. Also for each problem, we propose solutions for eliminating that security problem.