The virtues of volunteering

Taking on volunteer work for an organization pledged to IT security can pay off handsomely in solidifying business partnerships, fostering corporate security and earning kudos from your boss. Volunteering in key positions, however, inevitably takes time way from the job - meaning volunteers face working longer hours to compensate.

Working extra hours to compensate for time spent volunteering is a fact of life for Paul Simmonds, CISO at ICI, a U.K.-based manufacturer of paints and specialty chemicals that has 355 business sites around the world connected via a global WAN.

His day job involves deciding how security will be implemented on behalf of tens of thousands of ICI employees. In his volunteer capacity, Simmonds is a member of the board of the Jericho Forum, a user-based organization of mostly large, global firms, for example, BP, Procter & Gamble and Qantas. The forum's mission is to collaborate on finding ways to facilitate e-commerce without the need for traditional security measures, such as perimeter firewalls and proxies. For about a year, vendors have been permitted to join, but they don't have privileges to vote on the forum's documents and IT architecture papers.

Click to see: Paul Simmonds, CISO, ICI

Since Simmonds took it on, his volunteer work of advocating for the Jericho Forum's philosophy, known as de-perimeterization, and publicly speaking about it at trade shows and other meetings has consumed about 5% of his time, he says.

To Simmonds, it's more than worth it because he believes the forum's collaborative efforts are critical to the future of doing business on the Internet, where financially motivated cyberattacks are growing and consumers appear increasingly afraid of online commerce.