contents

business
 
Jericho Forum Unveils New Architecture

Jericho Forum is launching a practical blueprint geared to showing organisations how to architect for safe business collaboration. The Collaboration Oriented Architectures framework - presented at the Jericho Forum Spring Conference at Infosecurity Europe - lays out a set of design principles allowing businesses to protect themselves against the security challenges posed by increased collaboration and addresses the business potential offered by Web 2.0. It consists of a clear scheme based on real live case studies that allows firms to build for secure transactions in a world where the borders between the organisation and the outside world have crumbled.

"Every day IT managers are under pressure to work with people outside their organisation who are partners rather than employees. To be effective, both parties need access to intellectual property but this precious data is commonly transferred via an infrastructure that the organisation cannot control effectively. With the COA, we are laying out a clear framework of people, processes and technology that need addressing if business is to rise to current challenges effectively. The good news is that any business trying to work with COAs, can extract as little, or as much information as is required. All the technologies we are suggesting are backed by products and procedures that are already working in commercial environments. We are simply presenting an effective way of bringing them altogether", said Paul Simmonds, Jericho Forum board member and former CISO at ICI Plc.

Collaboration Oriented Architectures (COA) are information architectures that comply with a de-perimeterised framework. They enable enterprises to operate in a secure and reliable manner, in an environment where it is increasingly normal to interact without boundaries, regardless of where the data is being held or the number of parties collaborating. As mergers and acquisitions become rife and the advent of social networking makes security much harder to police, COA become vitally important.

"The old risk model simply doesn't cut it anymore", said Adrian Seccombe, CISO and Senior Enterprise Information Architect at Eli Lilly and Jericho Forum board member, "Unless organisations transform the way they perceive, execute and manage risk and architect for change, they will not only leave themselves exposed to growing security threats, they will also be left standing in competitive business stakes. We need to move away from an economic model based on the stand-alone enterprise to a collaborative model based on guilds where competence is the driving force".

Seccombe's own organisation, Eli Lilly, is itself establishing just this type of Collaboration Oriented Architecture as it moves away from being a bricks and mortar pharmaceutical company to a fully integrated pharmaceutical network. Their aim is to not only to lower cost but primarily to gain access to precious expertise gained through collaborative working.



write your comments about the article :: © 2008 Computing News :: home page