Identity Managment Solution: How do you manage, with confidence, who does what on your IT systems?
Over the past few years, the U.S. Government has moved from identification cards that were totally unique in format and look for each agency, to a standardized format for all U.S. Government issued cards. This process happened because of Presidential order HSPD-12 (PIV). This order created a way for any agency to know what a valid identification card should look like and to have a way to validate that a card is valid even in times of disaster. The scope was all U.S. Government employees and contractors which is a very large user base.
Many agencies understand that the PIV card has the potential to control and audit both physical access and logical access to all resources. The ability to look at one data base and see what compounds, buildings, rooms, systems, and electronic records an individual has access to can solve many problems associated with our growing mobile environment.
An example could be a disaster where individuals might have to use another agencies facilities and possibly systems. This type of scenario can present a serious challenge for U.S. Government agencies. Add to this emergency responders during events like hurricanes and how to manage all these identities becomes quite a challenge.
Sun Fed, dedicated to supporting the U.S. Government with these challenging problems, has teamed with some of the leading technology companies in the smart card, PAC, and biometrics space to create an end-to-end solution that can help any agency manage their user identities from the enrollment process, provisioning, physical/logical access points, through changes in access points, and finally through the de-provisioning of that user. This solution is designed to create a single work flow location with role based access to meet the stringent security requirements of separation of duty under the U.S. Government operates. The solution also tackles the problem of a data base for card provisioning, then another data base for physical access points, and then even another data base for IT resources. In most cases there was no way to be sure that once a person moved to another role within an agency that their access in all these places was updated correctly. This problem continued all the way out to employee termination either through retirement or someone moving on to anther company or agency. These process were often paper driven and hard to audit. Sun working with leading companies like AWARE biometrics, Biobex, Crossmatch, SecuGen, ActivIdentity, Bell ID, Cybertrust, Entrust, and Quantum SAFE PACS then integrating Sun software like JES Identity Manager, JES Identity auditor, JES Portal, Solaris, and the JES Application server and Sun hardware all using open standard protocols to bring this entire solution together. Because it is based on open standards other open standards compliant products can be used in a plug and play manor to keep the customer from being locked into a single vendor.
This end-to-end solution provides complete end-to-end
audit from cradle to grave for all users. The solution also will help
adjudicate and correlate current users within an agencies current diverse
systems to help centralize user provisioning and audit. And one of the
keys to this solution is users can still be maintained in an automated
fashion in their current diverse data bases without changing user names
or user identities in each of these systems.
With identity being one of
the biggest challenges many U.S. Government agencies face and with Sun's
dedication to open standards and hard work with industry leaders in the
identity space have brought together a strong end to end solution for
any agency or commercial company trying to solve an identity problem.
Take a look at our Identity Management Solution under Fed's Security Solutions and let me know what you think!
