From: GovMission
by Kal Gangavarapu
In the beginning of the year, Federal CIO Steven Van Roekel unveiled the draft Federal Mobility Strategy. The draft version of the strategy has six core objectives centered around the areas of governance, reusability, acquisition, security and interagency collaboration which are needed for mobility.
While announcing his draft mobility strategy, CIO Stephen Van Roekel had identified FedRAMP as one of innovative models that can be replicated for the federal mobile journey. FedRAMP is a productive and enabling framework for cloud services that was developed collaboratively by agencies, cloud service providers and third-party validators. The framework is supposed to accelerate cloud adoption, and, if replicated, could be helpful in accelerating mobile adoption.
Currently several agencies are planning for, and executing, mobility initiatives. These initiatives are funded and executed in silos. A closer look at these initiatives highlights several common themes – need for scalability, usability, security, policies, technology evaluation, et al. In order to bust silos and achieve a greater synergy among different mobility initiatives, it’s clear that a common framework is needed.
This common mobility framework should address six common issues that are facing agencies. These issues are:
Policy Alignment – The agency-specific policies must be aligned with the national mobility strategy, a final version of which is due in the spring from the Office of Management and Budget. The Pentagon has taken an important step in this direction by postponing the release of its own mobility strategy while it reviews the national strategy. “We are tweaking ours to align with it,” said Rob Carey, deputy CIO of the DOD.
Device Management and Support – Supporting a multitude of devices with different form factors is a major issue for agencies. Government agencies have gone one of two routes with mobile devices in the past: RIM’s BlackBerry, or, for special needs, devices built to their own specs. Going forward, agency CIOs want the flexibility to support dozens of devices, including tablets, from different manufacturers and running different operating systems.
Security – When it comes to security, what works with traditional computing devices such as PCs does not necessarily apply to smart phones and other mobile devices. Agencies need revised policies that are centered around data to secure mobile devices.
To help increase security, CIOs plan to use a combination of thin-client architecture, where data and applications run and are stored on secure servers; virtualization on devices to separate business data from personal data; and data encryption. Mobile device management solutions that provide the ability to wipe data from lost devices, will also be important.
App Development and Deployment – More than 100 mobile apps are being developed by various agencies and are available on the public app store on USA.gov. These apps provide information and basic transactional capabilities for government services.
The disparate mobile app plans across the federal landscape could benefit from a more comprehensive approach. For one, agencies need to decide whether to build or buy apps. Agencies also need to identify the right app platforms and target devices strategically.
BYOD – Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) provides the cheapest and fastest way to mobilize federal employees. Unfortunately, various interrelated aspects usually complicate what should be a seemingly easy way to implement a mobility strategy.
With the ability to quickly, effectively and cheaply mobilize the federal workforce, it’s essential that BYOD implementation should proceed. However, proper governance and policies need to be in place to ensure personal devices don’t compromise network security or stress the network.
The federal government is often looking at the private sector for best practices. Some of the leading private enterprises have utilized a FedRAMP-like mobility framework to accelerate their mobility journey. By implementing a framework like FedRAMP, the federal government could go a long way towards helping agencies become more mobile, agile and flexible.
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