Jericho Forum

The Jericho Forum is an international group of organisations working together to define and promote the solutions surrounding the issue of de-perimeterisation. It was officially founded at the offices of the Open Group in Reading, UK, on Friday 16 January 2004. It had existed as a loose affiliation of interested corporate CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers) discussing the topic since the summer of 2003.

It was created because the founding members claimed that no one else was appropriately discussing the problems surrounding de-perimeterisation. They felt the need to create a forum to define and solve consistently such issues. One of the earlier outputs of the group is position paper entitled the Jericho Forum Commandments which are a set of principles that describe how best to survive in a de-perimeterised world.

The Jericho Forum consists of "user members" and "vendor members"; originally only user members were allowed to stand for election, however since December 2008 this has been relaxed, allowing either vendor or user members to be eligible for election. The current board (January 2009) is (in alphabetical order); John Arnold (Capgemini), Philippe Courtot (Qualys), John Meakin (BP), Adrian Seccombe (Seconded), Paul Simmonds (ex-AstraZeneca), Shane Tully (Seconded), Bob West (Seconded - Echelon One), Steve Whitlock (Boeing), Andrew Yeomans (Commerzbank). There is no "chair" or president: the board votes by majority, and the day-to-day management is provided by the Open Group.

While the Jericho Forum had its foundations in the UK, nearly all the initial members worked for corporates and had global responsibilities. Today there is user organisation involvement from Europe, North America and Asia Pacific, vendor involvement from Europe & North America and academic involvement from Europe & Asia Pacific.

After the initial focus on defining the problem, de-perimeterisation, the Forum then moved onto focussing on defining the solution, which it delivered in the publication of the Collaboration Oriented Architecture (COA) paper and COA Framework paper.

The current focus of the Jericho Forum is "Securely Collaborating in Clouds", which involves applying the COA concepts to the emerging Cloud Computing paradigm. The basic premise is that a collaborative approach is essential to gain most value from "The Clouds".