Today, Fortinet joined theOpen Cybersecurity Alliance (OCA), an industry-wide initiative to bring a new level of interoperability and data sharing across cybersecurity products. The Open Cybersecurity Alliance (OCA) is a new open source project with initial code contributed by Fortinet’s Fabric-Ready Partners IBM and McAfee and overseen by the OASIS international consortium focused on cybersecurity initiatives. OCA aims to bring vendors and end users together in an open cybersecurity forum where product information and business needs can be exchanged freely. This way the derived insights, analytics and findings can be used to accelerate industry integration improvement.

At the heart of many cybersecurity discussions lies the concern of how digital transformation introduces significant complexity. Most vendors claim they deliver simplified offers, yet true simplification in the cybersecurity threat landscape remains largely elusive. There are many factors preventing businesses from realizing a more seamless approach to transformation, including the myriad point solutions emerging weekly. The reality is that each offer a different managerial interface, and for every new solution a new operating system must be learned. Fortinet is unique in that we offer the Fortinet Security Fabric, which provides an extensive suite of solutions spanning the entire threat landscape tied together through a single OS.

The founding members and initial contributors for the OCA are IBM and McAfee, who are joined by Advanced Cyber Security Corp, Corsa, CrowdStrike, CyberArk, Cybereason, DFLabs, EclecticIQ, Electric Power Research Institute, Fortinet, Indegy, New Context, ReversingLabs, SafeBreach, Syncurity, ThreatQuotient, and Tufin to collaborate on this new initiative at OASIS. Fortinet recognizes that most of the sponsors are already Fortinet Fabric-Ready Technology Alliance partners. It was clear for Fortinet that the OCA would improve our integration efforts and act as a catalyst for easing the move for our customers embarking on new digital transformation projects.

The OCA will address the threat management lifecycle, including threat hunting and detection, analytics, operations and response. By developing protocols and standards, it will enable products across the cybersecurity ecosystem to interoperate and share information.

The OCA will support commonly developed code and tooling and the use of mutually agreed upon technologies, data standards, and procedures. The purpose of the OCA is to develop and promote sets of open source common code, tooling, patterns, and practices for interoperability and sharing data among cybersecurity tools. For enterprise users, this means:

• Improving security visibility and ability to discover new insights and findings that might otherwise have been missed
• Extracting more value from existing products and reducing vendor lock-in
• Connecting data and sharing insights across products

Learn more about Fortinet’s Fabric-Ready Partner program here.