Secure Business Austria (SBA)

Secure Business Austria is a competence centre focusing on IT-Security founded by the Vienna University of Technology, Graz University of Technology and University of Vienna in 2006. In the second research phase from 2010 to 2017, the Vienna University of Economics and Business will join the center as a fourth full academic partner. Secure Business Austra currently employs about 40 researchers and is located in Vienna, Austria. The research centre performs basic research in IT security with a clear heading towards a practical usage by our industrial partners. It incorporates their partners’ own R&D efforts and brings in its basic research perspectives. SBA has four main areas of research: (1) Governance, Risk and Compliance (2) Data Security and Privacy, (3) Secure Coding and Code Analysis and (4) Hardware Security and Cryptanalysis. “Data Security and Privacy” is a newly established area in SBA which has a strong focus on digital preservation challenges. It deals with automated and trusted workflows and auditable processes for decision making (e.g., preservation planning), Secure Documents Audit & Certification and Disaster Recovery. Case studies on Digital Preservation as well as preparations for compliance audits in the field of long-term retention of digital objects are being conducted with partner institutions. The work further includes research on the specific aspects of document and software application security pertaining to long-term digital preservation. Furthermore, audit services for SME repositories allow institutions to validate the trusted status of their repositories. Over the past years the team working on digital preservation at SBA has gained research and practical experience in this field by actively engaging in national and international projects. Specifically, the research group in the “Data Security and Privacy” area includes experts recruited from the Digital Preservation team at Vienna University of Technology, which is being expanded, beginning June 2010. Members to join SBA in Summer have been involved in many of the leading European initiatives in digital preservation, including the Digital Preservation Cluster of the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries, the FP6 projects Digital Preservation Europe (DPE) and the Integrated Project PLANETS, the German competence network NESTOR, and a recent national project Digital Memory Engineering (DME), developing digital preservation solutions for small and medium enterprises.