Today business innovation means extending beyond the enterprise—open collaboration, direct interaction with customers, tighter integration with partners, and incorporating external talent and resources. Enterprises increasingly use information technology to drive their innovation, but without the right security strategy, business innovation could easily be stifled or put the organization at great risk. Yet information security is typically not considered strategic to business innovation.

A transformation is just beginning to take hold in the industry. We are working with some of the top security leaders in the world to accelerate that transformation and identify a vision for the future.

The Security for Business Innovation Council, convened by RSA, is a group of 10 of the top security executives from global enterprises in a variety of industries. These companies are highly regulated, very protective of their intellectual property, and care deeply about their reputation with customers and business partners. All recognize that to be competitive, information security needs to be part of their business innovation process. Their security programs represent some of the most advanced in the world.

"Typically, in most global organizations, security is viewed at best, as a necessary evil and more commonly as a necessary friction," said Bill Boni, a Council member and Corporate VP and Corporate Information Security Officer at Motorola. "This derives from security's primary focus on attempting to constrain behavior to prevent negative events. Although well-intentioned, the inevitable result is that security practitioners are not viewed as enablers of innovation, but as people preventing the business from doing what it needs to do."

RSA has conducted in-depth interviews with Council members and is publishing their ideas in a series of reports. The first report provides an overview of the current situation and its impact on the business. It begins to put forth a vision for the future including initial recommendations for how security teams can become full partners in the business innovation process. It also makes predictions for how the role of information security will evolve.

Learn more about the relationship between security and business innovation and read the first Security for Business Innovation Council report on the RSA Security for Business Innovation website.