Industry giants Cisco and IBM have announced that they will work together to help firms address the security issues caused by integrating multiple security products and services. Their two main aims are to offer more effective ways to stop external threats such as hackers, viruses and worms; and to give better control in situations where customers, staff and business partners are accessing each other’s internal data and applications. IBM joined Cisco’s Network Admission Control (NAC) programme on the day of the announcement and said its Tivoli Identity Manager agent for Cisco’s Secure Access Control Server will be available in March, allowing the identities of firms’ customers, employees and business partners to be managed more effectively across a wide range of networked business applications. Full Story