Cautious welcome for new user forum

The Jericho Forum was established in late January by 10 large Europe-based corporations, including oil giant BP, chemical company ICI, the BBC and the British Post Office.

Its goal, according to Paul Simmonds, global information security director for ICI, is to create a roadmap of security requirements for the next two to five years.

These requirements will reflect the changing nature of information security, away from relying solely on a defensive network perimeter, to a more multi-layered approach. It is hoped that that roadmap will then encourage vendors to make their products more interoperable than is currently the case.

"We will be feeding the results of our discussions back to the vendors," said Simmonds, "and letting them know that if they don't do this for us, then we'll probably have to change suppliers."

Early reaction to the announcement was positive. "Organizations such as Jericho can be very useful to us," said Raimund Genes, European president of Trend Micro. "They can let us know what the customers expect from us. But it is too early to say how this one will work."