At some companies, however, collaboration is still pretty basic. Last year, C. Warren Axelrod, director of global information security at Pershing LLC, which provides services to investment banks, oversaw a project for sending the company's storage tapes off-site. He enlisted the aid of Jersey City, N.J.-based Pershing's physical security and facilities departments to physically secure the tapes en route. "There are times when it makes sense to combine both areas," he says.

But Axelrod, like many of his peers, acknowledges that security convergence is still an evolving area. "There's a lot of cross-support and information-sharing that takes place," says Axelrod. "But most of the time, we're working on completely different things."

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Security Convergence: The Compliance Component

By some accounts, regulatory requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act have led physical and information security departments to work more closely with each other.