IBM, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft & Juniper team to secure the net

Stuart Corner
Monday, 30 June 2008 12:37

IT Industry - Strategy

Five of the biggest names in IT - IBM, Intel, Microsoft and arch-rivals Juniper Networks and Cisco have banded together to fight Internet security threats, just a month after the Malaysian Government put up $US13m to create an international partnership against cyber terrorism.

The five vendors have created the Industry Consortium for Advancement of Security on the Internet (Icasi), www.icasi.org , a non-profit organisation. Its members says it will enable them to work together to address multivendor security threats, providing a mechanism for international vendor and customer involvement, and a government-neutral way of resolving significant global, multi-product security incidents.

They claim that "To date there has not been a trusted vendor environment that allows companies to identify, assess and mitigate multi-product, global security challenges together on the customers' behalf." Icasi will not respond to every product security issue that emerges, but try and respond to and reduce the potential customer impact of global, multi-vendor cyber threats.

The organisation has been created to fill a critical gap in the global IT security landscape highlighted by CEOs and senior leaders from IT and communications firms in a 2007 report to the US president . They said that: "[existing] operational response frameworks are not sufficient to keep pace with globalisation and technological convergence…nor do they adequately include private sector participation in these processes."

Icasi is built around four guiding principles customer security; agility and effectiveness; collaboration and trust; leadership and innovation. It hopes to change how vendors work together on multi-product security fixes and to develop and share innovations for preventing and mitigating security challenges. It intends to work with other organisations with similar aims and interests.
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