Cisco, EMC, Microsoft Team

WASHINGTON -- Cisco® (NASDAQ: CSCO), EMC® Corp. and Microsoft Corp. today announced the formation of an alliance of technology vendors that will offer one of the most comprehensive, security-enhanced, commercial, multi-vendor, end-to-end information-sharing technology architectures for helping protect and share sensitive government information. The Secure Information Sharing Architecture (SISA) combines industry-leading applications, information infrastructure, and networking technologies to help protect customers' existing information technology (IT) investments. This architecture offers a consistent approach for breaking down the barriers across traditional organizational and jurisdictional IT infrastructure boundaries, so sensitive human resources, financial and other information that is critical to mission accomplishment can have increased protection and be shared among authorized communities more effectively than if they were not to deploy SISA.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. governmental agencies have increased their focus on protecting sensitive content from being lost or stolen, while simultaneously working to create a more connected government. Better and more secure connectivity will enable sharing sensitive content across government agencies. Cisco, EMC and Microsoft, with support from other industry leaders, founded the SISA Alliance to develop IT architectures that permit only authorized personnel access to specific information while easing the management of shared, protected information across trusted communities.

"While government is attempting to break down the barriers between organizations to enable information sharing, it is also struggling with numerous high-profile data loss incidents. Breaking down barriers between government and partner organizations will require better confidence in the ability to keep information in the hands of only the appropriate users," said Steve Cooper, former chief information officer for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. "I applaud Cisco, EMC and Microsoft for coming together to provide us with a multivendor architecture for sharing information across different agencies so government agencies can collaborate better and respond more effectively where and when they are needed."

Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO)

Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)

EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC)