The Secure Chorus Group was announced today to support and promote interoperable, secure communications for enterprise and government. Secure Chorus is an independent, not-for-profit group with founding members including Armour Communications, BT, CESG, Cryptify, Cyber Y, Finmeccanica, Samsung, SQR Systems and Vodafone. Further members will be announced soon.
Secure Chorus will promote the development and uptake of secure communication technologies for enterprise and government through open standards and ecosystem development. The group will concentrate on building an ecosystem which will allow scalable secure communications that will work cross-platform, cross-vendor and cross-network. Through open standards and cooperation, the group intends to transform the market from providing small islands of proprietary security to providing a vibrant security ecosystem supporting diverse cross sector use-cases.
“Communications should never limit us,” said Elisabetta Zaccaria, Ambassador for Secure Chorus, and founder & CEO of Cyber Y. “Today more than ever, world-class organisations need to communicate with each other simply and securely. Enterprises need the confidence to know that their communication security solution won’t result in isolation and vendor lock-in, but allow connectivity at the highest levels of security. We are delighted to have helped bring together key industry players with the common goal of driving standardisation and interoperability. These companies have the vision to collaborate to create enterprise-ready platforms while competing to create a dynamic market.”
“The reality is that the secure communications market is a highly diverse one,” said Simon Parr, former Chief Constable and lead for ICT in UK policing. “Sectors such as finance, health, government, energy and emergency services all require secure communication solutions where they have absolute control over access to their communications. However, these same companies also need to communicate securely across different sectors. Most successful communication technologies have been founded on open standards and interoperability and in the security industry open standards are essential to build transparency and assurance. The Secure Chorus Group is the ideal vehicle for driving this process.”
Dr Nithin Thomas, co-founder and CEO of SQR Systems, comments: “Secure Chorus represents a really exciting milestone in delivering end-to-end secure communication to keep our data safe in mobile devices.
“Our ethos has always been to promote the use of standards based security, which is an approach we take in all our security products. We are however all too familiar with how fragmented the current market is. Secure Chorus will enable an ecosystem of technology vendors, service providers and network operators to work together to establish a common standard to ensure consistent security throughout the mobile network.
“This is a bold and ambitious initiative to create an international security standard which starts with secure voice communications but which will evolve to embrace a rich set of communication media. The UK has a proven history in leading the way for mobile interoperability, having taken the lead in establishing key standards that are part of the 3G and 4G networks that connect users around the world and we’re looking forward to being part of the Secure Chorus consortium to create an open standard which paves the way for innovation in secure mobile communications for the future.”
[su_box title=”About Dr. Nithin Thomas” style=”noise” box_color=”#336588″]
Nithin Thomas is a technology entrepreneur with expertise in development and commercialisation of technology research, having developed much of the early technology at SQR Systems during his academic career at the University of Bristol. He is the CEO and Co-founder of SQR Systems, where he has grown the company from a concept to early revenues, successfully delivering R&D projects through various private and public funded research programmes focussing on cybersecurity and secure data transmission. Prior to SQR Systems, Nithin worked in sales and marketing at a global technology consultancy.[/su_box]
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