IT security vendors brought their big guns to town this week to pitch encryption and identity management software to Australia's largest banks.

Both RSA Security CEO Art Coviello and PGP CEO Philip Dunkelberger were in Sydney promoting the critical need to protect company data and meeting with senior banking executives.

Coviello was showing off RSA's token-based identify management product while Dunkelberger was promoting the need for companies to "encrypt everything" including stored data.

Dunkelberger said PGP was planning releases in the next 12 months with the ambitious goal of providing seamless and secure communications with products as simple to use as antivirus software.

Coviello was also referring to antivirus software claiming authentication is the next hot security product to be widely purchased by companies as a result of the increasing use of business portals.

"As more important content goes online and a company's knowledge base is exposed, the need for strong user authentication goes up significantly," he said.

"Once you Web-enable company information then the firewall perimeter is no longer there which is why ID management is so hot; slowly companies are exposing apps to the public Internet. Until recently most ERP and CRM apps have been only client/server apps, but this is now shifting as they move online."

Commenting on recent government cyber-security initiatives, Coviello said IT security vendors do have a contribution to make to policy development.

"We are government suppliers; where does government get all its products and expertise if it doesn't come from vendors? Sure vendors can be self-serving, but that doesn't mean they don't have real solutions to real problems otherwise they wouldn't be successful commercial enterprises," he said.

Corviello doesn't support legislation to set IT security standards within the enterprise, but believes government's should start with themselves and be market leaders.

"People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones," he quipped.