Threat sharing networks are nothing new, but one forthcoming addition to the bunch could hold tremendous significance for the millions of organizations storing data beyond the firewall. Rackspace Inc. is reportedly in the process of recruiting its fellow providers for a consortium that will attempt to set deep-seated rivalries set aside to help make the public cloud a safer place.

The Texas-based hosting provider would find itself far from the top of the participant list in such a group, which will necessarily have to include bigger rivals such as Amazon Inc. to achieve the reach needed to accomplish its goals, but nonetheless boasts better qualifications than most to lead the initiative. And only partially because the whole effort is its idea in the first place.

More important is the fact that Rackspace has built up an impressive track record in managing cloud consortia, having helped create the OpenStack Foundation and, more recently, the Cloud Foundry Foundation, two of the most important such groups in the entire industry. The experience gained as part of those efforts should come handy in trying to convince the competition to sign up for its latest project.

The few details Rackspace chief security officer Brian Kelly shared with the press about his company’s initiative suggest that the proposed threat sharing network is modeled after the existing security initiatives in the retail and financial sectors. A participating provider will be able to quickly inform peers whenever a new kind of malware or attack is directed at their platform to defend against the likelihood of hackers reusing the exploit against a different cloud.

Facebook launched a threat sharing network of its own a few months ago with many of the same goals that is likewise geared towards web-scale companies. However, Rackspace’s effort is more comparable to the rivaling initiative that IBM Corp. introduced  shortly after, which targets a more generic enterprise audience but shares the underlying commercial motivation.

Kelly indicated that his company hopes to incorporate the intelligence obtained from members of the upcoming consortium into a paid security service that will help organizations to address newly discovered vulnerabilities in their systems faster. After all, there’s no reason why an exploit that can be used against cloud providers – which boast some of the best security in the world – couldn’t be used against a regular enterprise that doesn’t invest nearly as much in protecting their infrastructure.

The service has apparently already gone operational, suggesting existing threat intelligence sources are used to provide information about vulnerabilities for the time being, and is currently being tested with two “global customers”, according to Kelly. The consortium will follow suit next year if everything goes according to schedule.

Photo via JavadR