Cisco Systems Inc and IBM Corp on Friday announced a partnership that will see them work to make their respective security products interoperable, to make the lives of mutual customers a little easier.
The companies started talking about doing this a year ago, Cisco director of business development Dave King said. We saw we had almost no overlap between our solution sets and had a great opportunity to bring them together, he said.
As part of the deal, IBM joins the Cisco Network Admission Control program, a initiative launched last November under which Cisco kit can use data from partner companies’ software to make decisions about which users and devices can have network access.
IBM’s director of security strategy Chris O’Connor said IBM will also make Cisco’s Security Agent, the old Okena host-based intrusion prevention software, available as a preinstalled option for buyers of xSeries servers.
The Security Agent will also start leveraging the embedded security chip in IBM ThinkPads and ThinkCentres. This chip is based on Trusted Computing Group specs and allows user credentials to be stored in hardware, rather than software, where they can be copied, O’Connor said.
The deal also sees Cisco’s Access Control Server and IBM’s Tivoli Identity Manager user provisioning software integrated to that Tivoli can be used to provision ACS network privileges to new users. Usually, users would do this with a Cisco console.
King and O’Connor said that the two companies will work on further points of integration in future, and will also start to publish framework whitepapers, describing the deployment options of the joint offerings.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
