A Risk Analysis Method for Selecting Service Providers in P2P Service Overlay Networks

In an increasingly competitive market place, the development of collaborative networked environments has become a key factor to companies successfully leverage their business activities. Nevertheless, when these companies get involved in more volatile strategic networks, it is necessary to deal with additional risks that need to be identified, measured, and mitigated through a well defined process. In this sense, this paper aims to specify a method for risk analysis comprising a set of service providers (SPs) in a P2P Service Overlay Network (SON). In this applied, qualitative and essentially exploratory work, the proposed method assesses the level of risk present in a set of previously selected SPs using key performance indicators (KPIs), and measures the viability of a Virtual Organization (VO) formation using those selected SPs. A computational prototype was also specified and used to execute a set of tests to assess the proposed risk analysis method.