New Gold Member Partners with CII to Improve Internet Security and Fortify Open Source Infrastructure
The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), a project managed by The Linux Foundation that collaboratively works to improve the security and resilience of critical open source projects, today announced that Thales is joining as a new gold member.
A leader in critical information systems, cybersecurity and data security, Thales offers advanced data security solutions and services, delivering trust wherever information is created, shared or stored. It is recognized for its deep information and cryptographic security expertise that enables organizations to confidently accelerate their digital transformation. Thales technology is found right across the enterprise, in financial services, retail, healthcare and government and secures more than 80% of debit card transactions around the world.
The CII’s mission is to ensure that the open source code that underpins business today is secure and resilient. Many of the world’s largest technology companies already belong to CII, and Thales is the first global security business to join the initiative.
“CII is incredibly excited to see our membership base expand and add a security-focused company like Thales, which has a vast understanding of the complex information technology demands we face in today’s digital world,” said Nicko van Someren, CII Executive Director. “Its investment validates the importance of CII and is a great vindication of our work to security harden open source infrastructure to combat today’s complicated threat landscape.”
“Thales has implemented open source building blocks and standards both internally and for customers for two decades,” said Jon Geater, Chief Technology Officer at Thales. “Open Source in general and Linux in particular have become core to delivery of modern products and system, offering distinct utility, cost and performance advantages that we increasingly leverage to solve real-world problems. By joining CII we can bring our expertise and focus on security to bear on strengthening core open source infrastructure and working to eliminate the security weaknesses that can emerge from less well maintained or directed inclusion of Open Source technology into products and infrastructure in the Cloud and IoT era. This shared vision of Thales and the Linux Foundation is critical to Thales’s strategic development objectives, our ability to serve our customers, and to improving the state of the Connected World more generally.”
CII recently celebrated its three-year anniversary and announced a new governance structure to enable it to scale up its operations going forward.