Alliance Offers Way for Feds to Share

Sharing information within agencies -- much less among agencies -- has been hampered by systems that are not compatible. Still, policymakers say a free and secure flow of information is the key element in better managing government and producing better policies and public services.

Integrating these systems, which have incompatible protocols, security and data management systems, has proven to be an intractable problem. But Microsoft, Cisco and EMC have founded "an alliance of technology vendors that will offer one of the most comprehensive, security-enhanced, commercial, multi-vendor, end-to-end information-sharing technology architectures for helping protect and share sensitive government information," according to a statement released yesterday by the Secure Information Sharing Architecture (SISA) Alliance, the name of the new group.

According to a ComputerWorld article:

Cisco will lend its network protection and secure virtualized network links capabilities, EMC will provide its networked storage systems and information life cycle management tools, and Microsoft will add its identity management software and its expertise in client systems and operating systems, the executives said.

The other vendors include Liquid Machines Inc., which will provide content protection expertise, Swan Island Networks Inc., which specializes in trusted computing environments, and Titus Labs, a provider of e-mail and document classification tools.

The alliance gave no details on spending or contracts related to the effort.