A new cybersecurity alliance of 14 leading companies launched today with a pledge to bring interoperability and data-sharing across cybersecurity products

The Open Cybersecurity Alliance consortium, founded under the OASIS open standards and open source group, includes a raft of companies: IBM Corp., McAfee LLC, Advanced Cyber Security Corp., Corsa Techology Inc., CyberArk Software Ltd., Cybereason Inc., DFLabs SPA, EclecticIQ B.V., Fortinet Inc., Indegy Ltd., New Context Inc., ReversingLabs Inc., SafeBreach Inc., Syncurity Inc., Threat Quotient Inc. and Tufin Software Technologies Ltd.

The initiative launches with open-source content and code contributed by IBM Security and McAfee with an aim to design open-source security technologies that can freely exchange information, insights, analytics and orchestrated responses.

The problem the alliance is attempting to tackle is siloed data gathered by different security products.

“Connecting these tools and data requires complex integrations, taking away from time that could be spent hunting and responding to threats,” the alliance said in a statement. “To accelerate and optimize security for enterprise users, the OCA will develop protocols and standards which enable tools to work together and share information across vendors. The aim is to simplify the integration of security technologies across the threat lifecycle – from threat hunting and detection, to analytics, operations and response — so that products can work together out of the box.”

By developing and promoting open-source common content and code that allows data sharing among cybersecurity tools, OCA aims to improve enterprise security visibility and the ability to discover new insights and findings that might otherwise have been missed. It also hope to enable users to extract more value from existing products while reducing vendor lock-in.

“Today, organizations struggle without a standard language when sharing data between products and tools,” Carol Geyer, chief development officer of OASIS, said in a statement. “We have seen efforts emerge to foster data exchange, but what has been missing is the ability for each tool to transmit and receive these messages in a standardized format, resulting in more expensive and time-consuming integration costs. The aim of the OCA is to accelerate the open sharing concept making it easier for enterprises to manage and operate.”

Image: U.S. Department of Defense