18 October 2004 Networking giant Cisco is to team up with other industry heavyweights to tackle the problem of security, promising to alleviate the burden of managing the threat for IT departments.

Cisco last week unveiled plans to work alongside both IBM and Computer Associates and is expected to announce a similar deal with Microsoft.

“Protecting customer networks – and the business applications that run on those networks – from non-compliant hosts entering a network is a top priority,” Bob Gleichauf, chief technical officer for Security Technology Group at Cisco.

Engineers at Cisco will share technical details of its Network Admission Control initiative – which protects networks by denying access to computers found to contravene security policies – with colleagues at IBM and CA, ensuring greater interoperability between their security products.

CA will integrate security features from Cisco’s networking equipment with versions of its anti-virus and anti-spyware software, due for release this November. Meanwhile, IBM and Cisco will work on integrating Cisco’s NAC with IBM’s Tivoli security policy compliance software.

Reports also indicate that Cisco has reached agreement with Microsoft to build NAC compliance into Microsoft’s server and desktop software. Users had feared that with both vendors planning separate end-to-end security architectures, interoperability could have been an issue. Any agreement between the two would alleviate any worries.