Robert Fox, vice president and chief security officer (CSO) at Sprint Corp., spoke yesterday with Computerworld about his role at the telecommunications provider. Excerpts from the discussion follow.

How is the office of the CSO organized at Sprint?

At Sprint, there is no other security department. I have 275 people, 48 certified information systems security professionals. I have seven directors: directors of investigations, network security, vulnerability assessment, information security, physical security, operations, and business continuity and disaster recovery. So we are very technical and very traditional when it comes to physical and information security. The only thing I don't do is manage the day-to-day guards. That's done by administrative services. We also provide a product called Managed Security Services for Sprint's domestic and international data business customers. So if there's a customer in London, Tokyo or Cleveland, and they need firewalls, intrusion detection, authentication or virus protection, we provide it. We do presales support, sales support, technical designs of security systems and implementations.

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