During their keynote yesterday at RSA Conference 2007, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie outlined a vision for a digital world where people can easily and seamlessly connect across networks, platforms and devices – with confidence that their information won’t be compromised or stolen. Achieving this “anywhere access” vision, they said, will require serious, industry-wide collaboration and a commitment to investing in interoperable systems, processes and products.

To that end, Microsoft is hosting more than 26 companies in its Microsoft Partner Pavilion at RSA, with each company showcasing examples of security solutions and technologies to help customers be more secure. It is also hosting a Microsoft Network Access Protection (NAP) Partner Pavilion, which represents more than 40 working solutions from an ecosystem of 100 partners for NAP, a policy enforcement platform.

PressPass spoke earlier this week with Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of Development, Windows Core Operating System Division at Microsoft, about the company’s security vision and its efforts to foster industry-wide collaboration to help achieve the company’s vision of anywhere access.