Oracle is building an Information Assurance Centre at its offices
and has hired a veteran CIA officer to lead it.
The company hopes the centre will eventually become a security
research and development lab for the IT industry as a whole.
Oracle plans to complete construction of the centre's premises by
the end of this year. The company is currently in discussions with
government agencies, universities and major systems integrators to
establish a co-operative research and development relationship that
Oracle customers can tap into for assistance with enterprise
security.
The centre will provide expert advice on incident prevention,
detection and crisis management, and a test bed for new approaches
to security, business continuity and disaster recovery, Oracle
said.
The plan is to eventually extend the reach of the centre beyond
Oracle's customer base and make it a security research laboratory
that will "advance the state of the art in information security",
according to Tim Hoechst, senior vice-president of technology at
Oracle Service Industries.
"My hope is that this becomes more of an industry security centre
rather than an Oracle technology centre and that it expands to all
aspects of security from physical security to database security,
and everything in between," said Hoechst.
Oracle has hired David Carey, a 34-year veteran of the CIA and the
agency's former executive director, to head the new centre. Carey
is credited with playing a major role in revitalising the agency's
clandestine and analysis capabilities. He also expanded the chief
information officer's role at the CIA from simply a technology
manager to the agency's IT service provider.
The announcement of Oracle's new centre came on the heels of IBM's
formation of IBM Global Security Services. Analysts view both moves
as a push by vendors following the 11 September terrorist attacks
to take advantage of the burgeoning government security
market.
It is a trend moving in the right direction, said James Governor,
an analyst at Illuminata. "This kind of cross-organisation
coordination will become increasingly important. A distributed
world requires distributed approaches to security," he said.
Oracle's chief executive officer, Larry Ellison, has been touting
his company's security expertise. Only weeks after he pledged to
give the government free software for a US national identification
card, Ellison challenged the hacker community during the recent
Comdex conference in Las Vegas to break into the Oracle9i database,
which, he said, was "unbreakable." Ellison also pointed out that
Oracle had received 14 security certifications from the US
government.