The Jericho Forum began in 2003 when a group of global corporate CISOs came together informally to discuss an issue that no one was addressing – de-perimeterization – the erosion of the network perimeter. Concerned that the industry was valiantly trying to shore up an ever-crumbling corporate perimeter while trying to securely conduct business via the Internet, in January 2004 this unique group of CISOs formed a thought-leadership group and named it the Jericho Forum, under the auspices of The Open Group. 

Today, members include customer and supplier companies, government organizations, and academics, from Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.

The Forum is dedicated to the idea that success in today’s business environment is dependant upon the ability to collaborate and do business by enabling the secure flow of data over the Internet. Its members recognized from the outset that today’s business requirement for the flow of data between mobile workforces, customers, suppliers and business partners, is increasingly eroding the ability of traditional perimeter security solutions to protect our systems. To enable business to embrace the Internet while protecting valuable company information, our industry needs new IT security models. 

In 2004 the Forum set out to drive and influence development of secure architectures, technology solutions, and implementation approaches, for our de-perimeterizing IT world, to enable safe, secure collaborative inter-working, globally between enterprises – business partners, customers, suppliers, and out-workers, and to encourage development of open standards that would underpin these solutions.

Vision
To enable business confidence for collaboration and commerce beyond the constraint of the corporate, government, academic and home office perimeter, principally through:

• Cross-organisational security processes and services
• ICT products that conform to open security standards
• Assurance processes that when used in one organisation can be trusted by others.

Mission
Act as a catalyst to accelerate the achievement of the collective vision, by:

• Defining the problem space
• Communicating the collective vision
• Challenging constraints and creating an environment for innovation
• Demonstrating the market

Achievements by start of 2009

By the end of January 2009 the Jericho Forum members had:

• given numerous presentations at major IT conferences, explaining the challenges of de-perimeterization - 
• that it is happening now
• that it is inevitable, because business managers will continue to demand more connectivity over the Internet
• so we need to understand the new requirements for safe and secure operations in de-perimeterized environments, and for standards-based products and solutions which meet these requirements.  
• published papers explaining de-perimeterization
• published a set of "commandments", which define design principles for evaluating how secure an IT architecture is in a de-perimeterized environment
• published a set of papers defining a Collaboration Oriented Architectures (COA) Framework for designing secure architectures that satisfy the Forum's commandments. 

2009 revised Vision & Mission

In early 2009 the Jericho Forum announced its future direction is to continue to pursue its original purpose but in today's still rapidly evolving IT world. Success in today’s business environment is even more dependant now than it was in 2003, on the ability of businesses to collaborate safely and securely using their IT systems for secure flow of data. So the Forum's future focus is on the new challenges of enterprise-quality security for doing effective business collaboration in Cloud Computing.

Vision
To enable increased confidence and operational efficiencies in collaboration and commerce for all stakeholders in the context of emerging cloud models, principally through:

• Cross-organizational security processes and services
• ICT products that conform to open security standards
• Assurance processes that when used by one party can be trusted by other parties.

Mission
Act as a catalyst to accelerate the achievement of the collective vision, by:

• Defining the problem space through thought-leadership
• Communicating the collective vision
• Challenging constraints and creating an environment for innovation
• Demonstrating the market
• Influencing future architectures, services, products and standards.