Dan Verton

Barry Bycoff, chairman and CEO of Waltham, Mass.-based Netegrity Inc., has been named co-chairman of the TechNet CEO Cybersecurity Task Force, which is working with the federal government and other industry groups to shape national cybersecurity policymaking. Members of TechNet's CEO Cybersecurity Task Force represent leading computer networking, hardware and software companies, including 3Com Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Guardent Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., RSA Security Inc., Symantec Corp. and VeriSign Inc.

A public/private partnership in Oregon focused on homeland security information-sharing this month became one of the first grassroots efforts to move from concept to reality -- and is already planning for an expansion to other states.

In a move aimed at making it easier for systems to exchange information, the U.S. Department of the Navy this week announced the creation of its XML Business Standards Council (BSC), the first of four working-level groups that will form the basis for the service's first enterprisewide XML governance structure.

Regardless of how imminent a U.S.-led war in Iraq might be, IT budget constraints are preventing many companies from taking appropriate security and disaster-preparedness measures to defend themselves against possible retaliatory terrorist strikes.

A U.S.-led war in Iraq that could spawn new terrorist attacks in the U.S. could be less than two weeks away, but that hasn't prompted many companies in the U.S. to invest adequately in disaster recovery, according to a new study released Tuesday by Dataquest Inc.

The U.S. Navy confirmed this week that the Pentagon has given it the go-ahead to move as many as 310,000 Navy and Marine Corps IT users to the Navy/Marine Corps Intranet (N/MCI).

The official activation dates for the new U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the nation's first Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) are fast approaching. But experts warn that true enterprise integration is many months, if not years, in the future.

They may not be "structured, enabled or empowered to take a leadership role," but IT organizations, and CIOs in particular, are now playing a central, if not the central, role in building effective brands, according to Andrew Zolli, lead partner at Z + Partners, a marketing, research and forecasting firm in Brooklyn, N.Y.