Government

Best Practices

Whether to provide a basis for immediate applications or for easy extensibility for future applications, the security foundation for government agencies must have the following key characteristics:

• Be based on interoperable standards - to minimize the cost and time of integrating legacy applications while ensuring maximum compatibility with other government agencies and businesses.
• Be extensible and scalable - to ensure that the scale required for government agencies along with the anticipated transaction volumes within and outside the agency.
• Be proven - to minimize the risk, the solutions must be proven in secure government environments.
• Provide transparent, seamless security management - to minimize the deployment time and costs of administration, operations must be automated and invisible to end users.
• Support a variety of authentication methods- to provide a single solution for a broad range of applications that require different methods of authentication (PIN, password, certificates, biometrics, smartcards).
• Support a variety of applications - to provide a solution to support applications that will be deployed immediately as well as those envisioned for the future.
• Support a variety of clients - to provide a single solution that integrates seamlessly into desktop environments and other platforms.

Priority application requirements for homeland security agencies include:

• Secure enterprise-wide messaging between disparate email systems, both within organizations and externally with other groups including the Intelligence community and all levels of law enforcement.
• Secure networking to ensure that communications between back-end applications and systems are protected.
• Secure web portal access for access to Web-based applications including those for distribution of key agency data as well as back office functions such as payroll, badge access, human resources, and other internal processes.
• Secure Data to protect the confidentiality of data maintained on desktops or laptops.
• Secure VPN and Secure Wireless LAN to provide access to organization resources anytime, anywhere.
• Extending your Web portal and messaging security outside the department to facilitate secure communication and collaboration with other agencies and the private sector.
• Secure e-Forms both within and externally to enable secure collaboration and electronic distribution of data with a verifiable audit trail.

Transparent, seamless security management is key to scalability that agencies require as more and more applications and users are added. Without this approach, management for each application would be separate, and would force both users and administrators through a series of manual actions for the deployment and management of each.