Fighting fraud with grids

Continuing the grids in business theme, I went along to the 'Contracting in an eBusiness Environment' session yesterday which proved to be very enlightening. The talks in the session revolved around Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between computing resource providers and customers including an example as to how the commercial grid middleware GRIA is helping banks to fight the massive problem of money laundering.

Every year 1 trillion US dollars is laundered worldwide. The AMONG experiment (Anti money laundering in Grid) from BEinGRID is helping banks to cooperate in order to improve their Anti-Money Laundering (AML) mechanisms. As banks all have different AML systems, AMONG collaborates between these different platforms allowing for interorganisational sharing.

The GRIA SLA is set up to help ensure maximum security for this sensitive information. Among the measures in place is a limit on the number of queries between banking institutions – if this is exceeded the cost of a query greatly increases, discouraging malicious behaviour. All the SLAs correspond to unique grid accounts and also have set access controls. Find out more about AMONG here.

One of the other speakers at the session was John Brooke from the University of Manchester who is working on the BREIN (Business objective driven Reliable and Intelligent grids for real busiNess) project. I had a chat with John about BREIN and how grids can be used in business – watch out for the interview on GridCast later on today.