Despite a continued focus on security in the nations capital, one security commodity that many government IT professionals seek above all—more information from the private sector on outages and attacks—is still scarce.
Ever since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the government has urged private enterprises to pass along data on network attacks and outages, but companies remain largely reluctant to part with much data of that nature.
In the latest attempt to improve information-sharing efforts, in February, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., inaugurated the Chief Information Security Officer Exchange, billed as a public-private partnership. Nearly two months later, the private sector largely has maintained its distance.
The exchanges advisory board is to consist of six government IT security officials and six industry officials. Last week at a press conference at the FOSE conference and exhibition at the Washington Convention Center here, CISOs from the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, State, and Housing and Urban Development, as well as from the Internal Revenue Service, were named to the board.
On the private-sector side, only two companies have signed up—Computer Sciences Corp. and NetSec Inc.—and both sent sales professionals, rather than information security officials, to the forum. The companies will each pay $75,000 annually, and the first operational meeting is scheduled for mid-May.
Also at FOSE, Intel Corp. President and Chief Operating Officer Paul Otellini said his company is doing its part to enhance networking security by designing chips to accommodate enterprise systems at the platform level. The company is taking a more holistic approach than ever in developing its technology, Otellini said.
Later this year, the Santa Clara, Calif., chip maker will begin rolling out multicore technology capable of increasing processing power by 10 times over the next four years, Otellini said. A dual-core system shipping this year will incorporate Intels Active Management Technology, which enables the partitioning of computing tasks and allows administrators to limit access on the network.
Among other products unveiled at the show were a series of security appliances from Corrent Corp., of Tempe, Ariz. Based on Microsoft Corp.s Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2004, the appliances are billed to deliver advanced firewall, VPN and caching functions while being easy to deploy and manage.
CRU-DataPort Inc., a storage enclosures maker in Vancouver, Wash., launched new data ports to help agencies meet security requirements.