Evaluating the Virtual Organizations security solutions using the ISO/IEC 17799 standard

A Virtual Organization (VO) network, a solution to collaborative environments, allows the participating organizations to share and exchange resources and competencies for economical or educational purposes; thus, they can realize common projects. Within VOs, organizations must open their information systems; a secure distributed infrastructure should be deployed to interconnect the different organizations security domains. Security concerns are raised to setup collaboration means because each security domain defines an administrative authority, has a certain level of security and defines security policies to protect the organization assets. A global and consistent information security policy, extending the different organizations security policies, must be defined on the VO level. In order to build the chain of trust between organizations, we adopted the “level of maturity” concept and defined a tool based on the ISO/IEC 17799 directives. In this paper, we are using this tool to measure the maturity level of the proposed security solutions and test their efficiency for a VO environment.