Security think tank Jericho Forum is teaming up with the Cloud Security Alliance to develop best practices for secure collaboration in the cloud.

Jericho Forum -- a group of high-level, independent security experts -- and Cloud Security Alliance, a nonprofit group of security practitioners and vendors, say they want to help businesses "understand the opportunity posed by cloud computing and encourage common and secure cloud practices." The groups say they will aim to align the outcomes of their respective work on best practices in cloud security.

"The cloud represents a compelling opportunity to achieve more with less, but at the same time presents considerable security challenges," says Adrian Seccombe, CISO and senior enterprise information architect at Eli Lilly and a Jericho Forum board member. The alliance hopes to "dispel some of the hype and confusion stirred up in the cloud," Seccombe says.

Jericho Forum has been advocating best practices in "deperimeterization" during the past five years, and more recently has worked on the development of secure collaborative architectures. Last year, the group published a Collaboration Oriented Architectures framework, which offers a set of design principles for protecting businesses in collaborative and Web 2.0 environments.

Both Jericho and the CSA recently published initial guidelines for cloud computing. The Jericho Forum published a Cloud Cube Model, which is designed to be an essential first tool to help business evaluate the risk and opportunity associated with moving to the cloud. The CSA published its initial white paper at last month's RSA conference.

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