To provide information in the field, each support engineer has an electronic resource of reference information about the maintenance aspects of the company's products. This includes technical specifications and a history of issues that have previously been encountered.

Because of the sensitivity of the problem history (which contains confidential information such as customer details and failure frequencies), ACME Ltd currently distributes this information in two parts:

• A CD-ROM containing the technical specifications and maintenance schedules (which are not especially sensitive) for field engineers to use on-site from laptops.
• A centrally maintained database containing the sensitive problem history, which is accessed by means of a company Intranet. This database is updated centrally on a weekly basis following submittal of failure reports from field engineers.

Unfortunately there are some significant problems with this arrangement...